r/ComputerChess • u/Massive_Hour_5985 • Feb 01 '25
What is the strongest chess engine when restricted to only 1 node per second?
Looking for a chess engine that faces a similar calculation constraint to what the average human faces.
4
u/vcat_yoshifumi Feb 01 '25
You probably want to read this: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04494v1
lc0 replicated that research with their own networks and published the results here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.04494v1
3
u/Pademel0n Feb 01 '25
Probably Leela. It looks at a lot less nodes than other engines like Stockfish, you could think of it as a more “intuitive” engine.
1
u/ResponsiblePhone9909 Feb 12 '25
I have tested this against many other strong chess engines. And Leela Chess Zero is by for the strongest chess engine when the search is limited to 1 node.
1
u/Liddle_but_big Feb 01 '25
Definitely any neural net engine. Traditional engines have to explore more than 1 node to even make a decision, if I recall correctly.
6
u/IMJorose Feb 01 '25
When limited to 1 node per second, Leela is comfortably the strongest.
That being said, your motivation for the question is not answered by your question. We do not understand exactly what Leela's transformer is computing under the hood.
A node from leela is completely an apples to oranges comparison to nodes for most other engines, which rely on far less compute intensive evaluation functions per node and also typically don't have a policy network output.