Dispatches From The CCC: Man vs. Machine, Part I

Deep Blue vs. Kasparov. Deep Junior at Dortmund. Deep Fritz vs Kramnik. Leelenstein vs jjosh?

The history of humans playing computers is not a long one. The period in which chess engines and strong human players could compete on level footing was 10 or 15 years long, at most. Before that time computer chess was something of a punchline; currently, it is accepted that a top-tier engine on reasonable hardware can easily crush the strongest human players.

But there is nothing like a good human-engine match to entertain spectators. For that reason I present here the first part of a collection of engine developers losing to their creations. These engines are stronger than anything Kasparov or Kramnik ever played... and their creators not exactly grandmasters. 

     Is it Leelenstein, or Leelenstein's Monster?

First up is Leelenstein, a neural-network engine custom-trained on millions of high-level engine games and correspondence chess games. It began with the same binary as Lc0, but is being rapidly developed with unique updates. Leelenstein placed third in CCC7, behind only Stockfish and Lc0. Leelenstein's mysterious creator is known only as jjosh.

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She might look innocent, but even on one node, she plays a mean game of chess!

The second engine is Allie, a neural-network engine with original binary. It makes use of the same network as Leelenstein. Her creator, Adam Treat, is known to the CCC community as gonzochess. In the future he hopes to have her using alpha-beta (AB) pruning, rather than her current Monte-Carlo Tree Search (MCTS). In this game Allie is severely hampered, using no search but instead relying on pure intuition. (Spoiler: She won anyway).

The last game is me against Stockfish 9, included as a promise to the engine developers. Misery truly loves company.

That's all for today, but look out for Part II! As always, you should be watching the CCC.