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Meanwhile, the entire Div4 has been restarted, without Scorpio. The chat message is: hi everyone i am sorry to inform you Entrance Division 4 had to be restarted due to too many inconsistencies in book orders, probably as a consequence of the many crashes among other things. this seemed to be the on...

The last time the strongest chess engine was not Stockfish, Komodo, or Houdini was in December 2010, right before Houdini 1.5 was released. At that time, Rybka 4 was #1. The last archived version of CCRL 40/40 with Rybka as #1: https://web.archive.org/web/20101121055257/http://computerchess.org.uk/c...

This is very interesting and may at first appear difficult to explain. However, consider an engine that randomly crashes in e.g. 20% of the games. Elo-wise, this would create the same phenomenon: such an engine would always lose at least 20% of the games, even against the weakest of opponents, and i...

My feelings too, and Komodo MCTS is my #1 wish for TCEC S14. In fact, I'd really like to see a non-NN MCTS engine entering. Apart from Komodo, there's only Scorpio, but it's not strong enough even for Div4.

Both Lc0 (testnet and Deus) in both Div 4 and DIv 3 perform consistently below expectations (although people cheered their sore promotion from Div 4). "Too few games" in some total of 80+ games (yes, different nets whatever, matters less) and under-performance of some 200 Elo points is a marginal a...

Not unprecedented, happens to A-B engines too. In S12, Ethereal got 23.5 points in Div4 (counting Scorpio's games, but still!) - that was outrageous , something like mid-DivP performance if I'm not mistaken. Yet, as many will remember, Div3 was another story entirely, in which Ethereal was eclipsed ...

Just some brief remarks - I could write 5 pages on this issue. Creativity is not an absolute requirement for copyright; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sweat_of_the_brow. NN weights are intellectual property, but they are not source code. The GPL covers source code only. With the rise of NN, this ...

This is why deep residual neural networks perform better. They combine many convolution filters. They require better hardware to run on though. Yes - the problem with Leela is that it relies on an NN architecture which was used primarily for image recognition (where it performed brilliantly) and wa...

Also, your conclusion seems to confirm my feeling that Leela would suffer greatly in Chess960. Obviously, its opening-phase advantage over other engines would be nullified, but it's probably much more than that. If you train it to Chess960 too, it'd work fine. If I write a classical engine and make...

All in all, it is true than 3x3 filters do have some difficulty with heavy pieces in Chess, but another conclusion would be that Leela is more Chess-domain specialized than traditional Chess engines, which perform better in variants deviating seriously from Chess. An excellent find and - what is mo...