Ideas for future tournaments

Comment with your ideas here, and we'll submit them to chess.com!

1. Stockfish vs The Rest - A match, not a tournament.  Stockfish plays one side (or Lc0 if it ever catches up and becomes stronger).  The other side is played by a collection of other strong engines; whichever move is selected by the largest number of engines will be played; in a tie between two or more engines, the average rating of the engines selecting the moves will be the tiebreak.

2. A series of matches.  Start with the two lowest rated engines in the tournament; they play a match, the loser is eliminated, and the winner advances.  The winner then plays the third lowest rated engine in the tournament, and the loser is eliminated, and the winner advances to play the next engine.  Repeat until the top engine has also played.  This could be used as a way to make a tournament with a large number of engines and slow time controls finish in a reasonable amount of time.

3. Alternative to #2.  Instead of matches of two engines, do mini round-robin tournaments with four engines.  The bottom two are eliminated, the top two advance, and the next two are added for the next round.

Any more ideas?

I like the idea of number 2 or 3. The only issue with them is that the first x engines don't really matter in the long run, since one of the top 4 will win anyways. It is cool though.

The first tournament sounds nice as well, maybe with an addition of the engines also playing stockfish by themselves with the same openings, so it is clearly visible if they are stronger by themselves or together.

The biggest point thing that I woud like to add is that I personally really prefered Bullet Brawl with the short timecontrol to the longer timecontrols, since it makes it easier to just watch one game. When the games last 30+ minutes I hardly ever watch them fully, but that might just be me.

I suspect they're going to continue to do a mix of time controls.

A knockout tournament would be fun. You could use different time controls (maybe 10 rapid games and 10 blitz games). The tournament could also be double elimination to make it more interesting.

Cool! Good ideas! Keep 'em coming!

The first option wouldn't work. There would be too many situations where the best move is difficult to find and all the weaker engines would choose a poorer, more obvious move. Stockfish would win easily.

That could be avoided by not having many weaker engines.  8-10 of the top engines vs Stockfish.

Even if weak engines aren't an issue, who will manage time control?

That would be something for chess.com to decide how to handle, but it's not insurmountable.

Well although it would be possible, it would still be the least practical option and I would prefer the other options anyway.

A chess960 tournament. This removes the need of an opening book for variety. Downside: not all engines support chess960, e.g. I don't think leela does now. Would encourage the developers though to add this to the code.