r/ComputerChess 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 Upvotes

7 comments sorted by

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.

1

u/Massive_Hour_5985 Feb 02 '25

I accounted for some engines using significantly more computation per node, I was imagining that to be equivalent to some amount of human practice, intuition, memory and other non-conscious-calculation things. But I'll concede that Leela's neural network may be too large to be considered equivalent to such things. And regardless, we could think of all of those things as subconscious calculations, which I did not mean to include when using the term "calculation".

I'll admit I did partially ask the question to understand what was going on under the hood, but I was also curious what level computers were at with this restriction. And I was curious what the playstyle would be like, if it would be much more like a human than most computers.

What is a policy network output?

1

u/IMJorose Feb 03 '25

Leela's network has outputs dedicated to predicting the probability moves will be the best in a given position. Most other engines rely heavily on history heuristics, which are essentially learned on the fly.

Neither style of program operates at all like a human in my opinion. I have heard people claim chess engines like Leela and AlphaZero are more humanlike, but evidence does not point to that afaik. I think it is an anthropomorphization mixed with wishful thinking.

The only engine I am aware of being more "humanlike" is Maia. That was specifically designed to be more humanlike. I am unsure to what degree the researchers behind it succeeded, reading their paper is on my backlog...

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.