25
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Would an ensemble of chess engines beat the best one?
The answer is "No".
If you have a defined fixed set of resources - CPUs, memory, cache, etc. - and you allow one engine to have full use of them then that engine is going to be able to ...
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16
votes
Would an ensemble of chess engines beat the best one?
No, an ensemble of chess engines won't beat the best one. The reason is simply because of hardware.
Let's take the strongest CPU engines right now to keep things simple. These are Stockfish, Komodo, ...
- 26.1k
16
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Accepted
Why are Leela's fans so passionate?
You can't really objectively answer this question, but I'll share my view.
One of the important factors to take into account is that Leela Chess Zero project requires tremendous computational ...
- 284
15
votes
Why is Leela so good at beating Stockfish in the French/Slav?
Well, it is a small sample, but assuming that there are a lot more games like these, I think it could be the following things.
First, I am not sure when we first humans first decided that space was ...
- 32.4k
11
votes
Why is Leela so good at beating Stockfish in the French/Slav?
Generally speaking, Leela tends to have a better "intuition" and Stockfish is very good at brute force calculations. So in a structure like the French/Caro-Kann, where calculation becomes less ...
- 19.8k
11
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Why is Leela so good at beating Stockfish in the French/Slav?
Because of the enormous skill difference between these computers and humans, any kind of analysis will inevitably be post-hoc. We can tell ourselves stories about how "Stockfish should have [insert ...
- 628
11
votes
Alpha Zero vs Lc0 - time for self-play
In short, because DeepMind has TPUs. Lots and lots of TPUs.
By far, the most time-consuming part of the training process is generating self-play games. DeepMind used 5000 TPUs to generate self-play ...
- 211
11
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Accepted
Can an Irwin Cheat Detector catch a user who is using a Leela chess bot for cheating?
Leela works by performing an exceptionally sophisticated positional evaluation at a relatively shallow search depth, whereas most chess engines work by performing a simple evaluation at as deep a ...
- 1,679
10
votes
Would an ensemble of chess engines beat the best one?
Though I am not able to test it myself, I am confident of the following conclusion:
An ensemble of engines should be able to beat the strongest individual engine
Here are my key assumptions:
Given ...
- 1,095
9
votes
Why are Leela's fans so passionate?
Leela is special because it's the first strong open-source deep-learning engine. Defeating Stockfish (and also Komodo and Houdini) convincingly on all settings is a very significant milestone, ...
- 22.4k
9
votes
Train Leela Chess against myself
Not an expert but you can play against a "virgin" Leela by using one of the younger nets. For example in the first Leela test (the so-called training run) the strongest net was 11248. If you play ...
- 26.1k
7
votes
Would an ensemble of chess engines beat the best one?
The answer is more complicated than you want to try to make it. Any definitive "yes" or "no" answer begs the questions of the conditions of the match, the hardware used, and the ...
7
votes
Would an ensemble of chess engines beat the best one?
Nope, at some point a legal move is selected as best move. Who ever makes that decision can't be better than the best engine. Otherwise there is a new best engine.
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6
votes
Leela Chess Zero - UCI engine
Can't comment on hardware but will say something about Leela's strengths and weaknesses -
If you look through the games from the TCEC superfinal, sometimes Leela is brilliant. For example in this ...
- 26.1k
6
votes
Accepted
Leela Chess Zero - UCI engine
Lc0 is fully compatible with UCI. It's strength depends a ton on what hardware it's being run on. On any hardware (tested down to Raspberry Pi), it will be superhuman (over 2900 elo). With a RTX 2060 (...
- 1,088
6
votes
Alpha Zero vs Lc0 - time for self-play
This is happening because AlphaZero and Leela aren't playing against the same Stockfish. If you read the paper, AlphaZero beat Stockfish 8 (it also played a series against Stockfish 9 - same logic ...
- 26.1k
6
votes
Accepted
Is there Python code to use the Leela neural network?
Python utilities for experimenting with Leela Chess Zero a neural network based chess engine: https://github.com/glinscott/leela-chess/
Here: https://github.com/so-much-meta/lczero_tools
This allows ...
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5
votes
Train Leela Chess against myself
Yes, you could in principle set up Leela such that it learns by playing against you. It would require some programming skills and a lot of time to play games.
Currently Leela has been trained on 300....
- 19.2k
5
votes
Accepted
Lc0 gets slower if weight file gets bigger
The bigger weights file corresponds to a larger Neural Network, which means more computation per node, but better evaluation per node.This is expected, and there is nothing that can make a bigger NN ...
- 1,088
5
votes
Accepted
What is the Depth reached by chess-AI agents on a regular computer?
Up to date reference is practically impossible to give, since engines and hardware change on yearly basis.
You identified most important conditions, but I would like to add two more:
Presence of ...
- 811
5
votes
Accepted
Why is Leela Chess Zero rated low on CCRL leaderboards?
They test under CPU-only conditions. CPUs are not a good platform for neural network inference (because they are designed to do well on a large variety of workloads, as opposed to more specialized ...
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4
votes
Why are Leela's fans so passionate?
Anytime a group of people get extremely hyped about something (and especially when they aggressively bash alternatives), there's a good chance this is just human tribalism at work. Leela may become ...
- 19.8k
4
votes
Leela Chess PUCT Mechanism
As you noted, w_i is not calculated by the search tree. It is simply the number of wins out of the total simulations performed at that node (if this is the method used to score the node). This scoring ...
- 1,064
4
votes
Accepted
Help me choose hardware configuration
The biggest things that stand out here is the power supply and hard drive. For the first, getting a cheap power supply tends to be a bad idea since if it breaks, it can bring down a lot of other stuff ...
- 1,088
4
votes
Which engine is better at Chess960-Stockfish or Leela?
Currently, it's Stockfish: in the latest FRC exhibition (November 2020) Stockfish beat Leela +8 -0 =42.
- 26.1k
4
votes
Accepted
Can I download early versions of Leela chess zero?
For early versions, the lczero project's download page refers you to the lc0 releases available on GitHub. For versions from 2018, you can go the lczero repository on GitHub.
Note that while the ...
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4
votes
Accepted
Where was Stockfish's fatal mistake in this game against Leela?
The hardware allocated to you by Lichess for running SF is really under-powered when compared to a modern high-end desktop - let alone the TCEC hardware.
SF 14.1 NNUE on my hardware (32 logical cores) ...
- 557
4
votes
Where was Stockfish's fatal mistake in this game against Leela?
UPDATE: After viewing graffe's comment, I analyzed the alternative option that Stockfish could play, 18...Be7 instead of 18...Nxc4. It turns out that 18...Be7 is also losing for black, meaning that ...
- 505
4
votes
How to play with Leela Zero restricted to a one-node search?
A simple way to play against LC0 with no search is to challenge one of the lichess bots that do this. Lazybot, for instance, has a fairly current net and plays quite well for something that does no ...
- 772
4
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How to play with Leela Zero restricted to a one-node search?
instructions on how to do that are given in the supplementary material that's free with the book: https://www.newinchess.com/engine-training
That material describes how to use a really nice tool ...
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