Top Chess Engine Championship • Hacker News Board

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#11

Post by baxyl » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 2:19 PM UTC

anton-107 wrote: post #9

gringoDan wrote: post #8

Stockfish has won in the past 5 seasons. Interesting project – their open source engine is used on both Chess.com and Lichess. https://www.chess.com/terms/stockfish-chess-engine https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish

Would be interesting to see AlphaZero in this contest, but I don't think it is open source [1] How AlphaZero Completely CRUSHED Stockfish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dT6CR9_6l4

That was against an old version of Stockfish. Both Stockfish and Leela are much stronger now than AlphaZero.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#12

Post by civilized » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 2:22 PM UTC

baxyl wrote: post #11

anton-107 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting to see AlphaZero in this contest, but I don't think it is open source [1] How AlphaZero Completely CRUSHED Stockfish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dT6CR9_6l4

That was against an old version of Stockfish. Both Stockfish and Leela are much stronger now than AlphaZero.

...because they adopted neural network enhancements inspired by AlphaZero, or so I hear.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#13

Post by jimmytucson » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 2:23 PM UTC

anton-107 wrote: post #9

gringoDan wrote: post #8

Stockfish has won in the past 5 seasons. Interesting project – their open source engine is used on both Chess.com and Lichess. https://www.chess.com/terms/stockfish-chess-engine https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish

Would be interesting to see AlphaZero in this contest, but I don't think it is open source [1] How AlphaZero Completely CRUSHED Stockfish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dT6CR9_6l4

It is. Leela Chess 0 (LC0) won in seasons 15 and 17 in 2019 and 2020.

LC0 is the open source implementation of Alpha Zero’s Monte Carlo tree search + neural nets for static evaluation approach.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#14

Post by sebzim4500 » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 2:24 PM UTC

Icko wrote: post #10

anton-107 wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would be interesting to see AlphaZero in this contest, but I don't think it is open source [1] How AlphaZero Completely CRUSHED Stockfish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dT6CR9_6l4

Perhaps someone submitted LeelaZero at some point?

Yeah Leela even one once in 2019. Since stockfish moved to a hybrid approach (conventional evaluation + neural network) it has been unstoppable though.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#15

Post by sanxchit » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

anton-107 wrote: post #9

gringoDan wrote: post #8

Stockfish has won in the past 5 seasons. Interesting project – their open source engine is used on both Chess.com and Lichess. https://www.chess.com/terms/stockfish-chess-engine https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish

Would be interesting to see AlphaZero in this contest, but I don't think it is open source [1] How AlphaZero Completely CRUSHED Stockfish https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8dT6CR9_6l4

Leela Chess Zero is the open source successor of Alpha Zero, and has been the second strongest engine (except a few times where it bested stockfish) for the last few years.

[1] https://lczero.org/

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#16

Post by buzzy_hacker » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 2:30 PM UTC

civilized wrote: post #12

baxyl wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was against an old version of Stockfish. Both Stockfish and Leela are much stronger now than AlphaZero.

...because they adopted neural network enhancements inspired by AlphaZero, or so I hear.

That’s correct, but Stockfish uses neutral nets differently than AlphaZero.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#17

Post by jvsg_ » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 2:32 PM UTC

is there anything of this sort, but for go?

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#18

Post by CWuestefeld » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 2:48 PM UTC

Other than the board, that page is completely opaque to me. There's a whole bunch of what are apparently technical stats, but I can't even infer enough to know whether big numbers are good or bad.

This would be a whole lot more engaging with more explanation, at least hover tips over all the fields and so forth.

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#19

Post by dmurray » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 2:58 PM UTC

tialaramex wrote: post #3

isaacfrond wrote: post #2

The Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) is a computer chess tournament. The goal is to provide the viewers with a live broadcast of long time control, quality chess - played strictly between computer chess engines created by different programmers. One Season is divided into several Stages and lasts about 3-4 months. The winner of the Season will be the TCEC Grand Champion. They are current playing to lowest league--…

> live broadcast As in, real time to the computation? Why though. The SC2 bots don't compete in real time, many of them can't, most of those that can are clearly hampered when playing against a human (necessarily real time) versus a machine (not real time), but you just watch the matches as if they'd happened in real time after the game is finished. Why not just have a fixed pace unrelated to how long the moves "real…

Most chess players play through chess games after the fact at their own pace, clicking one button to move ahead or another to move backwards. We've had this ability for hundreds of years: at one time using printed pages and wooden chessboards instead of computers, but the principle is the same.

But if you're really interested in the TCEC as a competitive sporting event, you might prefer to watch the drama in real time. How many people record the Superbowl and play it back at 100% speed the next day?

Re: Top Chess Engine Championship

#20

Post by tialaramex » Thu, Feb 03, 2022, 3:10 PM UTC

irishsultan wrote: post #7

tialaramex wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> live broadcast As in, real time to the computation? Why though. The SC2 bots don't compete in real time, many of them can't, most of those that can are clearly hampered when playing against a human (necessarily real time) versus a machine (not real time), but you just watch the matches as if they'd happened in real time after the game is finished. Why not just have a fixed pace unrelated to how long the moves "real…

> As in, real time to the computation? Why though. Why not? What have SC2 bots (or their abilities) to do with chess bots? > Why not just have a fixed pace unrelated to how long the moves "really" took to calculate, with a (no longer real time) clock shown to indicate how the machines used their allotted time? You can't show moves that haven't been played yet, so either your pace is much too slow, or you have to wait…

> You can't show moves that haven't been played yet, so either your pace is much too slow, or you have to wait until the game is finished before displaying it.

This makes sense for human players, but the Chess Engines aren't human, so their matches can proceed in parallel. Whereupon a human audience isn't actually watching them in real time anyway. AIUI The engines are not learning during tournament play, so unlike a human (who may discover an opponent's weaknesses during play over the course of a tournament) they're only getting updates at specific points between play.

"That's not how humans do it" is a pretty weak excuse even if not for the fact that TCEC has a completely inhuman design. Humans don't start from positions chosen more or less arbitrarily to reduce the number of draws, whereas TCEC does.