White in Comp v Comp

Does white have an advantage when a chess program is pitted against itself?

Sure. Just as in grandmaster games, White has a small advantage due to the fact that it gets to move first.

That is the theory, but has the experiment been done?

Yeah, I did a tournament a while back to confirm it. I don't remember the exact numbers, and unfortunately the PC it ran on had a hard drive failure. I'm trying to bring the hard drive back from the dead, but I'm not sure it'll be possible. (I might have to resort to a Live CD recovery disk of some kind, as the OS wouldn't even recognize the hard drive.)

I could run it again, but I'd have to do the setup again. You could also do it yourself; ChessGUI is capable of having only one engine always play White.

I seem to remember it was somewhere around 55%, which is in line with the results posted in the following article (the last paragraph in the "Winning Percentages" section:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First-move_advantage_in_chess

Thank you!!