New rewritten Lco engine ( Ceres)

Announcement from Leela discord.

Long time community member and developer @dje has created a new chess engine that uses Leela Chess Zero networks. It appears much stronger than lc0 (see the performance test below).

Link to source code: https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres

How to setup the engine: https://github.com/dje-dev/Ceres/blob/main/Setup.md

New engine is approx 2.3x faster than Lco!

Thanks. I look forward to reading how the speedup was achieved. The obvious answer (which might be wrong) would be by using smaller nets.

My opinion (which I cannot support with data) is that at the moment, the sweet spot for network size is somewhere between Leela and NNUE, and a BIG breakthrough will come when the training of the networks improve so that bigger networks with lower NPS become more effective than smaller, faster networks.

Here is a Boxed version that was uploaded by Chad on Discord. You will need to have Dot Net 5 installed.

Ceres: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1yPF13m7rgsP9xM6f1UsOSeLhS2_lW1gz/view?usp=sharing

Dot Net: https://dotnet.microsoft.com/download/dotnet/thank-you/runtime-desktop-5.0.1-windows-x64-installer

Have you checked out the real time monitoring tool.

Looks like you got it to work, we will soon find out if it is as strong as announced.

Admin wrote:

Looks like you got it to work, we will soon find out if it is as strong as announced.

Yeah, I had to run in Powershell 1st

Code:

dotnet tool install --global dotnet-counters

Then I ran from Command Line, which updated the ceres.json file also.

Code:

ceres setopt launch-monitor=true

After that just running normal ceres.exe would automatically pop up real time monitoring window which can be disabled by editing json file.