Leela Zero is a

free and open-source Free and open-source software (FOSS) is a term used to refer to groups of software consisting of both free software and open-source software where anyone is freely licensed to use, copy, study, and change the software in any way, and the source ...

computer Go Computer Go is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) dedicated to creating a computer program that plays the traditional board game Go. The field is sharply divided into two eras. Before 2015, the programs of the era were weak. The best ...

program released on 25 October 2017. It is developed by Belgian programmer

Gian-Carlo Pascutto Gian-Carlo Pascutto (born 1982) is a Belgium, Belgian computer programmer. He is the author of chess engine Sjeng (software), Sjeng and Go software Leela (software), Leela, and the original author of the free and open-source Go software Leela Zero. ...

, the author of chess engine Sjeng and Go engine Leela. Leela Zero's algorithm is based on

DeepMind DeepMind Technologies is a British artificial intelligence subsidiary of Alphabet Inc. and research laboratory founded in 2010. DeepMind was List of mergers and acquisitions by Google, acquired by Google in 2014 and became a wholly owned subsid ...

's 2017 paper about

AlphaGo Zero AlphaGo Zero is a version of DeepMind's Go software AlphaGo. AlphaGo's team published an article in the journal ''Nature (journal), Nature'' on 19 October 2017, introducing AlphaGo Zero, a version created without using data from human games, and ...

. Unlike the original Leela, which has a lot of human knowledge and heuristics programmed into it, the program code in Leela Zero only knows the basic rules and nothing more. The knowledge that makes Leela Zero a strong player is contained in a

neural network A neural network is a network or circuit of biological neurons, or, in a modern sense, an artificial neural network, composed of artificial neurons or nodes. Thus, a neural network is either a biological neural network, made up of biological ...

, which is trained based on the results of previous games that the program played. Leela Zero is trained by a distributed effort, which is coordinated at the Leela Zero website. Members of the community provide computing resources by running the client, which generates self-play games and submits them to the server. The self-play games are used to train newer networks. Generally, over 500 clients have connected to the server to contribute resources. The community has provided high quality code contributions as well. Leela Zero finished third at the BerryGenomics Cup World AI Go Tournament in

Fuzhou Fuzhou (; , Fuzhounese: Hokchew, ''Hók-ciŭ''), alternately romanized as Foochow, is the capital and one of the largest cities in Fujian province, China. Along with the many counties of Ningde, those of Fuzhou are considered to constitute t ...

Fujian Fujian (; alternately romanized as Fukien or Hokkien) is a province on the southeastern coast of China. Fujian is bordered by Zhejiang to the north, Jiangxi to the west, Guangdong to the south, and the Taiwan Strait to the east. Its capi ...

, China on 28 April 2018. ''

The New Yorker ''The New Yorker'' is an American weekly magazine featuring journalism, commentary, criticism, essays, fiction, satire, cartoons, and poetry. Founded as a weekly in 1925, the magazine is published 47 times annually, with five of these issues ...

'' at the end of 2018 characterized Leela and Leela Zero as "the world’s most successful open-source Go engines". In early 2018, another team branched

Leela Chess Zero Leela Chess Zero (abbreviated as LCZero, lc0) is a free, open-source, and deep neural network–based chess engine and volunteer computing project. Development has been spearheaded by programmer Gary Linscott, who is also a developer for the S ...

from the same code base, also to verify the methods in the

AlphaZero AlphaZero is a computer program developed by artificial intelligence research company DeepMind to master the games of chess, shogi and go. This algorithm uses an approach similar to AlphaGo Zero. On December 5, 2017, the DeepMind team rel ...

paper as applied to the game of chess. AlphaZero's use of Google TPUs was replaced by a crowd-sourcing infrastructure and the ability to use graphics card GPUs via the OpenCL library. Even so, it is expected to take a year of crowd-sourced training to make up for the dozen hours that AlphaZero was allowed to train for its chess match in the paper.

References

External links

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Leela Zero
on

GitHub GitHub, Inc. () is an Internet hosting service for software development and version control using Git. It provides the distributed version control of Git plus access control, bug tracking, software feature requests, task management, continuous ...

Leela Zero
on

Sensei's Library Sensei's Library (commonly referred to as SL among Go-players) is an Internet website and wiki A wiki ( ) is an online hypertext publication collaboratively edited and managed by its own audience, using a web browser. A typical wiki conta ...

Play Leela Zero
on ZBaduk {{Go (game) Go engines Free and open-source software 2017 software Applied machine learning