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Posted by Matthew Sadler on 28th February 2024

Getting Leela to analyse and play in the style you want! Part 3 – More adventures in Crazy Leela’s GROB Semi Slav?!?!

n this post, I continue my adventures with Crazy Leela’s Grob Semi-Slav! After being rather marmelised when taking the gambit pawn, I decided to refuse the offered pawn in a couple of games. Let‘s see how that went! A video of these games is available from my Silicon Road YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/EK9_iA63Nvo while engine analysis of these games is available from the usual place: http://cloudserver.chessbase.com/MTIyMTYx/replay.html

Posted by Matthew Sadler on 22nd February 2024

Getting Leela to analyse and play in the style you want! Part 2 – Introducing Crazy Leela’s GROB Semi Slav?!?!

In a previous post, I described how to set up the new Leela feature called WDL Contempt (described here by the Leela team: The Lc0 v0.30.0 WDL rescale/contempt implementation – Leela Chess Zero (lczero.org)) In this post I look at one of the opening discoveries I made using a Leela optimised to search for promising lines against a prospective (fictitious!) opponent rated 400 ELO points below me! (A roughly 2700 ELO vs 2300 ELO scenario)

Posted by Matthew Sadler on 18th February 2024

Getting Leela to analyse and play in the style you want! Part 1 – Setting up WDL Contempt

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.

Posted by Matthew Sadler on 11th February 2024

The Google Searchless chess engine

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.

Posted by Matthew Sadler on 8th February 2024

Deep Blue rediscovered: introduction to my YouTube series on the 1997 match

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?