Running Leela / Acquiring Komodo

I ended last week's post, Installing Leela, with visual proof that I was up and running:-

Here's a screen capture showing the end of the first game and the start of the second.

The main page for the project, lczero.org (where LCZero = Leela Chess Zero), currently shows:-

'Number of accumulated games' = 15.200.000

Active Users
424 users in the last day have played 163117 games

This is followed by a long list of users, where I'm somewhere near the bottom:-

User Games/Day Version Engine Last Updated
rjs-dot-in 6238 10 10 2018-05-28 08:26
[...]
bemweeks1 14 10 10 2018-05-28 07:04
[...]

I don't know what 'Version 10' and 'Engine 10' mean, so I'll come back to that another day. All users on the list show the same values for those fields.

My username leads to a page listing games created by my account: User bemweeks1. Each of those games links to a separate viewer page for the game, although the pages for the earliest games say only, 'Internal error'. The entry for the most recent game looks like this:-

Id Network Created At
15213386 bf43640... 2018-05-28 07:04
[...]

It leads to the complete game score:-

1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nf3 d5 4.cxd5 exd5 5.Nc3 Bf5 6.Bf4 Bd6 7.Nh4 Be6 8.Bxd6 Qxd6 9.e3 O-O 10.Bd3 Re8 11.Nf3 Bg4 12.h3 Bh5 13.Be2 c6 14.O-O Nbd7 15.Qb3 Ne4 16.Rfe1 Bxf3 17.Bxf3 Ng5 18.Bd1 Rab8 19.Qa4 a6 20.Ne2 Rbd8 21.Qb3 Qc7 22.Nf4 Ne6 23.Nxe6 Rxe6 24.Qd3 Nf6 25.Bf3 h5 26.b4 Qe7 27.Reb1 Ne4 28.Rb2 h4 29.a4 Qg5 30.b5 axb5 31.axb5 c5 32.dxc5 Nxc5 33.Qd4 b6 34.Rb4 Qf4 35.exf4 Rde8 36.Bxd5 Rf8 37.Rbb1 Rd6 38.Bxf7+ Kxf7 39.Qxd6 Kg8 40.Qxb6 Na4 41.f3 Nxb6 42.Ra6 Rb8 43.Kh2 Rb7 44.Rc1 Nd5 45.Rc5 Ne3 46.b6 Ra7 47.bxa7 Nxg2 48.Rc7 Kh7 49.Rf7 Nxf4 50.a8=Q Nh5 51.Qc8 Ng3 52.Qc7 Nh5 53.Qe5 Kg8 54.Rb7 g6 55.Ra8+

It goes without saying that the game has absolutely nothing to do with my own play. It just happens to have been played on a machine that belongs to me. As I scrolled through the moves, it looked like any other game until I came to this position.

After 34.Rb2-b4

White looks better here. The White Pawns present a better structure and White owns the open a-file. There are still plenty of moves to be played, but White should do no worse than draw. Suddenly Black played 34...Qf4, placing the Queen en prise to two pieces. Give that move '??'. I don't understand what happened here and will look into it another time.

***

Excitement in the world of chess engines: Chess.com Acquires Komodo; Launches New 'Monte Carlo' Version Similar To AlphaZero (chess.com; 24 May 2018):-

Chess.com has acquired the powerful computer chess engine Komodo, the company announced today. The acquisition of the Komodo comes with the release of an exciting new version of the engine called Komodo Monte Carlo, where moves are chosen by win probability and not traditional evaluation. The approach is similar to the probabilistic methods of the machine-learning chess projects AlphaZero and LeelaChess, which have fascinated chess players with their intuitive styles and fantastic success.

The press release went on to explain the basics of Komodo's 'Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS)'. It also announced,

Along with the software and brand, the entire Komodo team has agreed to join Chess.com. GM Larry Kaufman and his Komodo team will work with Chess.com developers to build the most insightful, powerful, and deepest-analyzing chess engine possible.

It's not clear how this will change the chess engine landscape, but Chess.com never does things lightly.