Leela Chess Zero Blog
As per the usual expression of BOOM of TCEC chat when an engine finds something good, Leela right now is making a great surprise in her first appearance in a TCEC superfinal by leading after 64 games with 2 points more. A 33-31 score in favor of Leela.
TCEC superfinal of 14th Season is currently being played as
Stockfish and Leela battle for the TCEC Season 14 Champion title.
Till now Leela surprises Stockfish and after 33 games the result is a
perfect tie with 16.5-16.5 points.
Yet 67 more games will be played so everything can happen.
Leela has won the TCEC CUP-2! After many very difficult battles and games
against the top Chess engines, Leela eventually managed to win the tournament.
In the final Leela managed to beat Houdini at the very final game(before
tiebreaks start) with a spectacular win.
As always, consult the [glossary](https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/wiki/Technical-Explanation- of-Leela-Chess-Zero) if needed.
Ordo rating
The standard way to to put a number on anyone’s chess skills is to determine the Elo rating. There is however an alternative called [Ordo rating](https://www.blogger.com/Ordo%20rating%20https://github.com/michiguel/Ord o), which is “a program designed to calculate ratings of individual chess engines (or players). It has a similar concept than the Elo rating, but with a different model and algorithm. Ordo keeps consistency among ratings because it calculates them considering all results at once.” Leela’s self play rating will from now on be based on Ordo which will better reflect the actual progress. Especially T30 had a run-away self-play Elo at more than 11.000, which those new to Leela often misinterpreted as a real Elo of 11.000 instead of the more realistic 3400-3500 Elo.
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Leela just made it on the superfinal of the TCEC tournament!
There, she will face Stockfish on a 100-games match for the title of TCEC
champion.
As always with Leela it was a dramatic promotion at the last moment, at the
last game.
Where in that game Stockfish missed a win to the relief of Leela’s fans. The
win of course was not that easy to find.
Quick recap
Remember to consult the [glossary](https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/wiki/Technical-Explanation- of-Leela-Chess-Zero) if you find some terms confusing.
With Test20 being suspended on November 16th, we started December with Test30 as the only game in town. Remember that test30 was “test10 without the bugs” and “Test20 with policy sharpening”. Test20’s high CPUCT value (5.0) had never really worked and Test10’s low setting was deemed too low. CPUCT is a parameter that influences how likely you are to try something new vs something you know works, and was one of the crucial details missing from the original DeepMind paper. Test30 also used 5.0 but with a technique called policy sharpening to counteract the negative effects of a high CPUCT.
Not everyone knows, but recently there was a match between Lc0 and GM Daniel
Naroditsky on Lichess.
For those tho missed, here is recording of this stream on
Twitch and [Lichess Blog
entry](https://lichess.org/blog/XBsCBBMAACUA3CJi/gm-daniel-naroditsky-takes-
on-leela-chess-zero) about that event.
Lichess.org will host a match between the mighty **Stockfish 10 **and
Leela. It will be a 6 games match with time control of 5’+2" with
ChessNetwork commentary.
Games will be played on 15th December at 17:00 UTC.
Leela’s big journey to try to go to premier division of TCEC, has started!
TCEC season 14 is running for the last couple of weeks and Leela has
participated in 3rd division of it, finishing in the top position easily and
now participates in the 2nd division trying to promote to 1st division.
As everyone has already heard, DeepMind has published a detailed paper on AlphaZero!
The announcement can be found [here](https://deepmind.com/blog/alphazero- shedding-new-light-grand-games-chess-shogi-and-go/). Scroll down the announcement to get links to the full paper text as well as supplementary materials (including PGNs of games and training pseudocode).