Suisho wins World Shogi AI final, Tachyon earns originality award for laptop NPU

Suisho won the seventh World Shogi AI Denryu-sen on November 15. The engine finished the final league with 11 wins, five losses and two draws in 18 games. Under the tournament’s scoring rules, that gave it 12.2 points. Tachyon, an entry that used a laptop’s neural processing unit to help search for moves, received the separate originality award. The two-day tournament was played online.

Suisho had finished third in qualifying with 10 wins, three losses and a draw. Nnuenagon led qualifying with 12 wins, one loss and a draw, then took second in the final with 10.4 points. Ramu Shogi finished third with 10. The organizer linked individual game records from its results tables, so developers and spectators can see how the same pairing played out with each program moving first.

Two games against each opponent

The first day used seven Swiss-system rounds, pairing teams according to their results as the event progressed. Teams played each opponent twice, switching who moved first for the second game. After 14 games the top 10 teams advanced. On the second day each finalist played two games against each of the other nine finalists. The two tables score the results of their respective days.

The rules gave the first player three minutes and the second player 10, with two seconds added per move for both. Referees could shorten the clocks if the schedule required it. A win was worth one point. In a draw, including one caused by a repeated position, the first player received 0.4 points and the second received 0.6. Suisho moved second in both its final-league draws. Adding those two results to 11 wins produced its 12.2 points.

Suisho won eight games moving first and three moving second. That left one first-player loss and four second-player losses alongside the two draws. Nnuenagon won seven games moving first, compared with two moving second. The rules use opponents’ scores and then defeated opponents’ scores to break ties. Each of the top three finishers had a different point total.

An engine tuned for search and a laptop experiment

Suisho’s entry lists a CPU as its computing platform. Its developers described a faster search and changes to the evaluation function, which assigns scores to positions as the engine weighs possible moves. Those scores help the engine decide which branches of a game to examine more closely. The public standings show how Suisho performed as an entry as a whole. They give no separate measurement of how much each engineering change contributed.

Tachyon’s team entered with an Asus Vivobook S 15 and put the laptop’s neural processing unit to work on the engine’s calculations. The organizers credited the team for designing the neural network, training it to work with lower-precision numbers and adapting its search to the computer together. Tachyon finished 27th in qualifying. Its originality award recognized the design independently of its placing.

Generative AI also appeared in the work of building engines. Obeni-san Tanuki’s team described an automated development process built around a coding agent. It placed ninth in qualifying and tenth in the final. Organizers said the TMOQ team used Claude Code to refine an engine that tries to move its king into the opposing side of the board. For AI entries, the rules barred people from influencing the engine’s choice of move during a game. Referees could permit someone to relay a move already chosen by a program in certain cases involving special hardware.

The entrant called 1995 used Codex to help bring an engine to an emulated computer with a 100 MHz Pentium and 32 MB of memory. It won five of its 14 qualifying games. Tachyon and 1995 competed under different hardware conditions, so their standings record how those complete entries performed in the tournament.

Professional player Yuki Saito, fourth dan, provided commentary on the final day’s official YouTube broadcast. Suisho received the seventh Denryu title and Japan’s education minister’s award. The tournament lists a first-place prize of 30,000 yen.