Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jka | Hacker News Reader

This is a slight tangent to the article, but in the hope HN readers will find this as fascinating as I have recently...

There's a three-way battle developing between AlphaZero (as described in the article, courtesy of DeepMind), LCZero[5] (derived from LeelaZero[1] -- an open source interpretation of the same principles as AZ), and Stockfish[2] (a long-standing open source chess engine that has recently begun including neural network support).

The 'Top Chess Engine Championship'[3] seems to be a good way to follow the latest news; they also stream matches live on their website[4] (it is quite an information-dense site).

You can play against an up-to-date implementation of Stockfish in your browser -- no registration or signup required -- at https://lichess.org

[1] - https://zero.sjeng.org/

[2] - https://stockfishchess.org/

[3] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship

[4] - https://tcec-chess.com/

[5] - https://www.lczero.org/

Edit: correct LeelaZero -> LCZero

LeelaZero is strictly used for the Go AI nowadays, the chess version changed their name to LC0 (or Leela Chess Zero, or LCZero), and the website is at [0]

AlphaZero is not involved in any battle with LC0 or Stockfish, as no one outside of Deepmind has accessed to it. The battle for chess supreme is between LC0 and Stockfish, with both trading blows pretty much every update :-)

[0] https://lczero.org/

My mistake, thanks for the correction :)

Very recently, with the advent of the NNUE evaluation and it's incorporation into stockfish, it is the undisputed champion over all others by a very significant margin.

It even beats out lc0 running on an RTX 2080 while itself running in single-threaded mode (it scales well in strength up to at least 32 threads, beginning to taper off from there)

The recently released Stockfish 12 with neural network evaluation seems to be the clear winner, combining the best of both worlds and handily beating classical Stockfish 11 and LC0 (which were pretty evenly matched on typical hardware).

Also very much worth reading GM Matthew Sadler's coverage of the superfinal games in the articles, section, e.g.:

https://tcec-chess.com/articles/Sufi_18_-_Sadler.pdf

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