Leela Chess Zero Blog
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Article by Cyanogenoid, member of Leela Chess Zero development team ._
Recently, Oracle investigated training the value head against not the game outcome z, but against the accumulated value q for a position that is obtained after exploring some number of nodes with UCT [[Lessons From AlphaZero: Improving the Training Target.](https://medium.com/oracledevs/lessons-from- alphazero-part-4-improving-the-training-target-6efba2e71628)]. In this post, we describe some of the experiments with Knowledge Distillation (KD) and relate them to training against q.
Leela after 6 consecutive draws in the series of games against Laser(division 1 engine) she won last 2 games so she promoted to next round where she will face Ethereal(premier division engine) that beat Rodent(division 4 engine) easily with 5-0 and promoted too. The games against Ethereal will probably take place on this Sunday.
When first Chess engines were born were very weak. First real Chess
program(even though in 1912 there was a King Rook versus King solver and in
1951 Turing wrote only in paper a Chess program) was written in 1951 by Alan
Turing’s colleague, Dietrich Prinz, but it was not able to play a whole game
but could only solve small “mate in 2” problems.
The interest in computer Chess was growing and more and more researchers in
artificial intelligence(AI) used Chess as a platform to showcase their
progress on AI. As hardware has started to evolve more and more, many
researchers started to be able to use the already known algorithm, that has
proved to be the backbone for future Chess engines: the Minimax algorithm
, that was invented many years before by the pioneer in so many fields, John
Von Neumann.
TCEC Cup continues and we already know 6 engines that have promoted to next
round.
Leela right now has a big fight with Laser and after 4 games it is on 2-2 with
4 draws.
The TCEC Cup has started and 2 match pairs will be played every day.
We remind that 32 engines will compete in a Knockout elimination tournament,
and in each pair match, the best out of 8 games will promote to next round.
That means if an engine completes first, in the 8 games, 4.5 points will
promote. As per their decision if an engine completes first 4.5 or 5
points , the match is stopped and the engine promotes to next round. So not
all 8 games will be played if not necessary.
Also the tournament would not necessarily be continuous like normal TCEC,
since only **2 pairs will be played every day **even if there is time for
more. The games will begin 12:30 UTC every day.
Leela won 16-14 against Komodo the 30 games match to determine 3rd position in CCCC1, while on the variants tournament she won a game against Stockfish while being handicapped having a Pawn less!!
It turned out that the version v0.18.0, that was released a few days ago, had a bug that caused it to miss tablebase wins sometimes.
Because of that, v0.18.1 is released. You can download it here.
Deepmind’s latest paper release ( Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm ) on 5 December 2017, presented a method of reinforcement learning for convolutional neural networks that its result was fantastic as they created 3 engines, one for GO, one for Chess and one for Shogi that were beating easily the best available engines of the time.
TCEC Cup is about to start in a few days and Chessdom.com just announced the complete pairings up to the final.
Leela is on the Stockfish side and if she will promote from the first match
against Laser she will probably face Ethereal in round of 16, so it will be a
tough match already.
But first has to overcome Laser of course.
Leela in TCEC Cup will use the v18 of Lc0 and 11248 net of
test10.
v0.18.0 is out of “release candidate” status, and now is fully released!
Can be downloaded here.
It has no changes relative to RC2. For the list of differences relative to v0.17, see posts for [v0.18.0-rc1](../../../2018/09/lc0-v0180-rc1-has-been- released.html) and [v0.18.0-rc2](../../../2018/09/lc0-v0180-rc2-has-been- released.html).