CACalChris·Jan 27, 2026Submission
Claude Code Ported LeelaChessZero CUDA Back End to ROCm: End of CUDA Moat
2 points · Open discussionLeelaChessZero
lc0
C++2018–2026
LeelaChessZero / lc0
lc0
Open source neural network chess engine with GPU acceleration and broad hardware support.
9Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
3.3KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Open source neural network chess engine with GPU acceleration and broad hardware support.
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
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Also in these discussions
- official-stockfish/stockfish · linked in 2 of the same discussions
Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 3:56:07 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year9 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2018-08-05 18:53:44 UTC to 2026-01-27 02:13:34 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2018 | 2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2 | 0 | 2 |
| 2019 | 2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 1 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
What Hacker News says
9 sourcesThat's Leela Zero (plays Go instead of Chess). It was good for its time (~2018) but it's quite outdated now. It also uses OpenCL instead of Cuda. I wrote a lot of that code including Winograd convolution routines.
Leela Chess Zero (https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0) has much more optimized Cuda backend targeting modern GPU architectures and it's written by much more knowledgeable people than me. That would be a much better source to learn.
In Ask HN: How to learn CUDA to professional levelYes, the Leela team has worked on a term they call Contempt.
(Negative contempt in this case would make the engine seek out less sharp play from whites perspective)
In the first link the authour talks about using contempt to seek out/avoid sharp lines.
lc0 and nibbler are free, so feel free to try it out if curious.
https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/pull/1791#issuecomment...
https://lczero.org/blog/2023/07/the-lc0-v0.30.0-wdl-rescale/...
In Gukesh becomes the youngest chess world champion in historyInteresting. As I know, Stockfish [1] chess engine exploits NNUE nets optimized for CPU and regularly beats up Leela [2], which explots traditional GPU-based networks based on AlphaZero architecture.
[1] https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish
[2] https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0
In CPU-based algorithm trains deep neural nets up to 15 times faster than top GPUAren't both Leela and Stockfish both freely available?
https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0
https://github.com/official-stockfish/Stockfish
In Shallow Trees with Heavy LeavesModern solvers: Problems well-defined are problems solved
2 points · Open discussionto learn chess, there's scid and the stockfish engine included in distros such as debian and ubuntu.
There's also the lc0 engine, which is the open source version of the mighty Deep Mind AlphaZero chess engine - linux installation instructions for lc0 are here: https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/blob/master/README.md
In What's your favorite free game that runs on Linux, and teaches you something?That doesn't follow. For you to confuse it, you need to change the inputs. For images, this is fine, we can smoothly change lots of little things. For chess games or go you don't have that freedom.
You can download the weights for LCZero right now though and try out your theory. https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/wiki/Getting-Started
In How AlphaZero Mastered Its GamesI only knew of Colaboratory before now because it's ended up contributing an awful lot of games to LeelaZero, the AlphaZero cone:
https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lc0/wiki/Run-Leela-Chess-Z...
In Colaboratory, a free cloud based Jupyter notebook environment requires no setup