February 18, 2024
Matthew Sadler
31 comments
I was recently triggered to investigate (finally!) a new Leela feature called WDL Contempt. This feature was beautifully described in this blog article (The Lc0 v0.30.0 WDL rescale/contempt implementation – Leela Chess Zero (lczero.org)) by the Leela team, but the implementation is slightly fiddly so you need an hour of quiet time to set things up right.
February 11, 2024
Matthew Sadler
8 comments
Just a few days ago, I was pointed to a new scientific paper by Google DeepMind. It’s amazing as it’s from Google DeepMind, it’s about chess, but it’s not about AlphaZero! The Google DeepMind researchers were trying to build a “searchless” chess engine: an engine that doesn’t calculate at all but finds great moves by “understanding” the position through evaluation only.
February 8, 2024
Matthew Sadler
6 comments
Garry won the 1996 match against Deep Blue by 4-2, though not without losing the first game. The 1997 match was thus eagerly awaited: what had / could Deep Blue learn from the first match and how much would it have improved?
February 2, 2024
Matthew Sadler
2 comments
The idea for a series of videos on the Garry Kasparov against Deep Blue matches of 1996 and 1997 came from a subscriber to my YouTube channel. I thought it was a great idea and I’ve become a bit obsessed with it!
January 26, 2024
Matthew Sadler
16 comments
I am pretty confident I have analysed more engine games than anyone else in the world, and I truly feel that my understanding of chess has benefited greatly from it. However, some aspects of engine play and evaluation are still difficult to grasp and internalise. I came across an instructive example of this while analysing a line of the Classical Pirc with 6…Nc6.