LCZero Accomplishments and Goals Thus Far

[AdminX]

Wow!

This is a big jump!

[mar]

Sigh..wake me up when it is 2800 elo running on singe CPU core, which is what every other engine uses in rating lists. As far as I am concerned, it is still a 2100 elo engine there.

Well, on my hw Leela seems to use CPU 2 cores + GPU, so I played a short match against my engine and Leela performed like 2800+ engine already (it was net 217) and the TC was 40/1 minute so rather fast for Leela.
Also people who want a strong chess entity don't care about 1 CPU.

Even mobile phones today already have multiple cores and since OpenGL ES 3.1 the GPUs are capable of running compute shaders,
so it's likely Leela will run even on mobiles in the future.

Nobody prevents other engines to utilize GPUs, but they can't.

What's a problem is huge tactical blunders - at least 100 elo, missing simple forks is rather embarassing.

[hgm]

You are comparing TFLOPS, which is irrelevant. It makes you compare algorithms in a completely biased metric. If you have two non-identical things it is always possible to adopt a metric that either will make one much better, or the other.

An algorithm always needs more than just a single type of operation. You have addition, multiplication, branching, storage... If one algorithm uses more branches, and the other more multiplications, I can arbitrarily decide which one will be 'better' by counting only branches, or only multiplications. To get a meaningful comparison you have to weight the elementary operations in proportion to their cost.

[noobpwnftw]

Where is the breakthrough in domain specific implementation exactly?

No one tells how to play - it learns for itself - perhaps ?

This is not domain specific as I understands it.
People tend to believe the alternative approach is somehow "superior", mislead by the results from a hardware overkill.

[Uri Blass]

Sigh..wake me up when it is 2800 elo running on singe CPU core, which is what every other engine uses in rating lists. As far as I am concerned, it is still a 2100 elo engine there.
I see so many excited people giving a hardware advantage to LCzero, like CCLS does for instance uses a GPU for LCzero and single core CPU for the rest of the engines.

I don't think anybody misses the fact that given a hardware advantage that will basically make the evaluation free, you can increase your elo to your satisfaction.
If Stockfish had its evaluation FGPA'ed it may be a 4000 elo engine but who cares for that anyway ? The fact is Stockfish has been throwing away evaluation features for the sake of speed throughout the years.

Daniel

I wonder 2100 at what time control and if the rating is not higher at longer time control.

Edit:I am not sure if the parts that stockfish throwed away were productive for stockfish even with no price in speed and I guess that stockfish had counter productive code in the evaluation not because it made it slower but because something that humans believe to help simply does not help.

Edit 2:I believe that stockfish scale better than weaker engines including engines with slower evaluation and when I say scale better I mean that if the weaker engine need 10 minutes against 1 minute of stockfish to get 50% then they need more than 20 minutes against 2 minutes of stockfish to get 50%

generally stronger engine at STC scale better and Alphazero is an exception to the rule if to believe Google.

[frankp]

Where is the breakthrough in domain specific implementation exactly?

No one tells how to play - it learns for itself - perhaps ?

This is not domain specific as I understands it.
People tend to believe the alternative approach is somehow "superior", mislead by the results from a hardware overkill.

I was just pointing out that we seem to be comparing the merits of too very different approaches on the basis of the arrangements of semiconductors they use.

(It seems that any discussion of A0/leela turns into a A0/SF 'willy-waving' contest. I am still fascinated that leela play such a high standard of chess, not compared to SF of course, on my consumers grade two generation old graphics card.)

[Albert Silver]

Sigh..wake me up when it is 2800 elo running on singe CPU core, which is what every other engine uses in rating lists. As far as I am concerned, it is still a 2100 elo engine there.
I see so many excited people giving a hardware advantage to LCzero, like CCLS does for instance uses a GPU for LCzero and single core CPU for the rest of the engines.

I don't think anybody misses the fact that given a hardware advantage that will basically make the evaluation free, you can increase your elo to your satisfaction.
If Stockfish had its evaluation FGPA'ed it may be a 4000 elo engine but who cares for that anyway ? The fact is Stockfish has been throwing away evaluation features for the sake of speed throughout the years.

Daniel

I wonder 2100 at what time control and if the rating is not higher at longer time control.

Edit:I am not sure if the part that stockfish throwed away were productive for stockfish even with no price in speed and I guess that stockfish had counter productive code in the evaluation not because it made it slower but because something that humans believe to help simply does not help.

I have an i5-2500K (quad-core) and a GTX1060. Playing g/10 matches, Leela 202 has had a ~2900 CCRL performance. The opponents used the quad. Note also that Leela does NOT use 100% of the CPUs, while the opponents do. This is seen clearly in the task manager.

[noobpwnftw]

You are comparing TFLOPS, which is irrelevant.

.

But any 'hardware avantage' should be measured in $$$, (possibly including the price of electricity);, other ways just don't make any sense.

I only compare GPU to GPU, to show how a TPU is different than a ordinary GPU which you can get with a few hundred bucks.

There is a limited number of GPUs you can pack in a "single machine", so does CPUs, so the per unit performance matters, no? Without that, how do you compare the price tag?

[hgm]

Exactly. The whole misconception that AlphaZero had any hardware advantage at all comes from ridiculously overweighting the importance of multiplication, because the CPU is extremely poor at that, and Stockfish happens to not need it. It is like claiming a wheelbarrow has an extreme hardware advantage over a helicopter, by only counting the number of wheels.

[noobpwnftw]

I was just pointing out that we seem to be comparing the merits of too very different approaches on the basis of the arrangements of semiconductors they use.

(It seems that any discussion of A0/leela turns into a A0/SF 'willy-waving' contest. I am still fascinated that leela play such a high standard of chess, not compared to SF of course, on my consumers grade two generation old graphics card.)

I think there is nothing wrong with the approach, and it appears to scale well because we are at the stage where people usually have 1 GPU in their computers, which is easier to do doubling than where they already had some 8 CPU cores.