Talking About Chess Engines

While working on last week's post, Catching Up with Engine Competitions, ...

My head is spinning with all of these computer chess events. They are starting to be like elevator music -- always there but doesn't demand any real attention.

...I started to wonder, 'What are the engine experts saying about these recent tournaments and about other events?' The two stars of the chess engine world are Stockfish and Leela -- Stockfish because it is winning everything in sight, Leela because it is based on an emerging technology and is improving rapidly. Both engines are open source and both have forums where their many fans can discuss current trends:-

• FishCooking (groups.google.com/forum/fishcooking)
• LCZero (groups.google.com/forum/lczero)

I really should spend some time on both forums to catch up with their technical developments and just might do that. In the meantime, using a relevant search, I identified a few other online forum resources and looked for recent conversations. Google gave me a logo-laden 'Related search':-

Google search on 'stockfish leela tcec'

Here are a few conversations in descending order of what I estimate to be the site's interest in the subject:-

• 2018-08-14: Strange Lc0 TCEC performance (talkchess.com) • 'The TCEC performance in Div 3 of Lc0 [...] is severely underpar from what we know having ordinary hardware, say reasonable home CPU and GPU.'
• 2018-10-19: Leela vs Stockfish dev is live : TCEC Cup Semi-finals (reddit.com) • 'We are down to the last four engines: Stockfish, Leela, Komodo and Houdini. SF v Leela is the first semi-final.'
• 2018-07-08: LeelaZero instead of stockfish (lichess.org) • 'Can we have the option to analyse our games with Leela?'
• 2018-97-12: Leela with massive hardware will be participating in ICGA tournament (chess.com) • 'A lot of Leela fans are so hyped about Leela participating in International Computer Games Association tournament.'

The interest from Reddit.com is somewhat surprising, although the site shows up increasingly in chess related searches. Why so little interest from Chess.com? Perhaps they see their own CCCC tournament as a rival to the TCEC. Note also their interest in the ICGA 'World Championship', which gets little attention these days from the engine community.

On a related subject, following up my post Chess Programming Wiki (July 2018), the resource is now available at Chessprogramming Wiki (chessprogramming.org). I won't adjust any of my previous links to the site, because it's enough to know that the destination pages are available.