Leela Chess Zero Blog

When doing machine learning it helps to use a standardized dataset such that methods can be compared in an objective manner. For machine vision, one of the earliest standard datasets is MNIST, a set of handwritten characters that was also used in the (arguably) first deep learning paper.

It seems Leela is hiding something that is beyond us. How else can be explained that after Fizbo a 3325 CCRL Elo engine with endgame tablebases in a dead 4-men position lost to Leela, now Leela in another dead draw position made Xiphos, a 3200 CCRL Elo engines, to lose!
At round 29 there was the first loss in this tournament of one of the big 3, as Houdini with black lost to Ethereal!

Leela had its first loss in the tournament after 27 games that went undefeated. It lost against Ethereal with black after she blundered in endgame.
But before that, a real circus game happened in the Leela game of course again. It was the Leela-Fisbo game with Fizbo the known drawmaster with 19 draws out of 25 games but Leela managed to hypnotize Fizbo to lose, while Fizbo was playing with tablebases and the position was a drawn with just 4 pieces remaining!

ROUND 23
Andscacs won Arasan in an important win for top8 place, while Ethereal and Booot drew their games.
Top 3 continued with wins but Shredder drew.
Leela took advantage of it and won against Laser so she is now alone in 4th place. Leela’s game was great, since while in the opening the game seemed dry with no much play but Leela dominated with clever Pawn moves and showing great long term understanding of the position it created a positionaly winning position.
Fizbo after 9 consecutive draws (17th in the tournament so far) it couldn’t hold and lost against the mighty Stockfish.

First half of the CCCC tournament has ended.
It’s a 46 rounds tournament and so 23 rounds have been played. Time control is 15’+5" and engines will play all against all twice, one with black and one with white, while pondering is on and no opening books are used and 6 pieces tablebases are being used.
Top 8 engines promote to next round.

As it seems 6 engines will fight hard for 5 places that lead to next stage provided that Stockfish, Houdini and Komodo will have no problems to get the 3 top places.
Leela, Shredder, Fire, Andscacs, Ethereal and Boot will fight for the other 5. Booot actually came out of nowhere to fight for getting in the top 8 and right now seems the outsider even though it has a good performance thus far. Leela and Shredder seem a bit safe right now but with 23 more rounds remaining everything is possible.

CCCC continues with Houdini on the lead a full point ahead of the 2nd Stockfish. Houdini till now seems unstoppable and is killing every other engine except for the top ones. Leela is 5th for now even though she won 2 games and drew the other.

Chess.com Computer World Championship continues with engines battling for the first 8 positions that would bring them to next stage.
Round 17 has been completed out of 46 that will be played.

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**After another 3 rounds have completed and we reached round 16 of 46 that would be played, Houdini continues its comfortable lead being 1 full point ahead of the second. Leela had a nice win against Fritz but didn’t manage to win against the weakest engine of the tournament Crafty! **

As many of you have noticed, Leela’s thinking time allocation seems suboptimal for during the CCCC games. It almost doesn’t spend any time in the opening, and spends a lot in the endgame.