Sunday
Mar032019
Stockfish Wins TCEC 14 (Barely)
Sunday, March 3, 2019 at 3:42PM
And I mean barely. Stockfish defeated Leela Chess Zero (Lc0) by the minimum margin, 50.5-49.5, to win the Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) for the fourth consecutive time and for the sixth time overall. It will also be for the last time, unless Lc0 is banned (as it should be for its completely different hardware profile, at least once it wins TCEC 15).
Speaking of which: it isn't the main event, but TCEC is running an "end of season bonus final" between Stockfish and Lc0 with a 12' + 3" time control, and in it the future is now: Lc0 leads this 100-game match 46.5-39.5.
tagged Lc0, Stockfish, TTCEC Season 14
Reader Comments (7)
I don't see why lc0 should be banned just because it makes better use of the gpu than other engines. That can be viewed as a software advantage as much as a hardware advantage.
[DM: Maybe I'm misunderstanding how it all works, but saying that it makes "better use of the gpu than other engines" is like saying that cars make better use of wheels than track and field athletes. The traditional engines are chugging away on CPUs, using different hardware in fundamentally different ways. I'm not asking for Lc0 to be scrapped and sent to the junkyard, but suggesting that because there's no way to create parity (is there?) it's a pointless task. At a certain point it will be stronger than Stockfish and the rest of the CPU engines, and unless something radical is done at the hardware level it's just pointless. Once cars could outrace people and then horses, there was no reason to keep having such races. No one thinks, "you know, Carl Lewis got beat by that Ferrari, but wow, look at Usain Bolt! He's gonna give that Bugatti a run for its money!"]
Do you think does Leela will be banned in the next tournament?
This type of AI is the future and there will be more engines similar to Alpha Zero in the future.
[DM: There's nothing wrong with that, but there's no point in continuing this particular exercise. There could be a GPU neural net championship and a traditional CPU championship. That would make sense. But if (since) there's no way to even out the growth curve of the two times of programs, it's a pointless exercise once the GPU engine is stronger. The CPU engines can't catch up, because their rate of improvement is necessarily slower.]
So, if I understand correctly, LC0 is a junior version of Alpha Zero that utilizes Monte Carlo tree search requiring enormous and commercially unavailable computer hardware resources. And hence, free open-source Stockfish is still where its at for the general chess playing public and GMs alike?
[DM: There's some sense in which Lc0 is available, but yes - what we have access to with Stockfish is closer to full-blast than what we can access of Lc0's maximum potential.]
You might be interested in the session from the Sloan conference, if you haven't seen it already. Some good stuff with Leela and Komodo, especially near the end of the (long) video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nvem6-aybBI&t=7s
The reason Lc0 won the "end of season bonus" is the same reason A0 "beat" SF8 in DeepMind's conditions. Apart from the massive hardware advantage for Lc0, there were no tournament-chosen openings, so with no book SF kept playing the same bad openings over and over again. SF walked into the Berlin Wall over and over again, just as SF8 did against A0.
TCEC/cccc is all about entertainment, but if they want to make conditions less pro-NN they could keep the massive hardware advantage but not allow tablebases.
"DM: There's some sense in which Lc0 is available, but yes - what we have access to with Stockfish is closer to full-blast than what we can access of Lc0's maximum potential."
What do you mean by this? It's downloadable from the website and if you have a computer it works fine and is not crippled in any way as far as I know. Am I missing something?
[DM: Maybe you are, maybe I am. I'll try to figure it out tonight. My assumption is that the Lc0 setup is much weaker unless one's computer setup is based primarily on GPUs rather than CPUs, and that's not what most of us have.]
DM: "My assumption is that the Lc0 setup is much weaker unless one's computer setup is based primarily on GPUs rather than CPUs, and that's not what most of us have."
You need a powerful GPU, like Nvidia RTX2070 or 2080ti. I think that costs well over $1000.
A weaker GPU will give weaker performance.