So I want to give many thanks to the developpers. But also thanks to dkappe who made the setup pretty easy or at least bearable to me with all the explanations on his site.
I don’t own any powerful hardware, so I had to go with the BLAS version. I am running v.0.20.2 together with the 11258-112*9 „distilled“ weights file right now.
If you are somehow like me, you may not have dared to dive into this new engine world yet. But actually it is +way+ easier than you may have imagined so far.
You only need three files: the lc0.exe and libopenblas.dll you get from the Leela site, and the *pb.gz weights file. You dump them together in some random directory and point your Chess GUI to the lc0.exe file – and then it behaves just like any other UCI chess engine you already know setup-wise.
What I mostly did is let it play games at tournament time control against the most recent Crafty version (25.01) I still have on my computer – and watch the games live.
It feels a bit like the old times, where you could watch GMs successfully play chess engines on internet servers for your personal enjoyment. With both sides on steroids that is
. All moves by LC0 feel incredibly meaningful – and you get the impression that you maybe could even understand them fully if you weren’t that bad at chess. The Crafty moves feel like they usually do
- quite strong, but weird at times.At least on my computer I can already kind of reject the idea that Crafty can be competitive under these conditions (although not by hard maths yet). LC0 is winning about 90% of the points so far.
But watching the LC0 games is so much fun that I wanted to share my experience with you.
Peter
