Leela Chess Zero

Now that I've finished with TCEC Season 11 (see last week's Battering the French for the final post), where should I go next? The first post in this current series on engines, Back to the Future with Chess Engines (April 2018), promised a look at the future. What could be more futuristic than AI? In the middle of last month, the TCEC organizers announced Leela Chess Zero enters TCEC Season 12 (chessdom.com).

Leela Chess Zero (LC0), an open source adaptation of DeepMind’s recent Alpha Zero artificial intelligence demonstration project, will compete in TCEC’s Season 12. In so doing it will become the first chess-playing neural net in history to publicly challenge traditional human chess programming.

Leela was placed into the lowest of the TCEC qualifying events, Division 4. Based on its poor performance, it might be at risk of being dropped for future TCEC seasons. Here's a crosstable of the event.

TCEC Season 12, Division 4

Ouch! I better not waste any time. For the next few weeks in this series I'll look at Leela and its technology.