La Maîtresse des Échecs - by Adam Carlton (part 4 of 6)

---

6: Intermission 1

According to Wikipedia, Leela Chess Zero (abbreviated as LCZero or lc0) is a free, open-source, neural-network-based chess engine based on DeepMind's AlphaZero. It is competitive with Stockfish and Komodo as the best chess engine in the world, and unlike the mind-numbing crunching of its competitors, its machine-learning roots give it superhuman flair and insight.

Hans has a forked (and modified) copy running on a small microcomputer the size and appearance of a small packet of mints, handy to slip into his pocket. His gloves are his own design of chorded-keyboard: the left talks to the amped-up lc0 in the mint box; the right uses an ultra-low-power frequency-hopping radio to talk to the device secreted in Petra’s earring. Hans wears an inconspicuous hearing aid to monitor everything.

Hans’s comms protocol maps chess’s algebraic notation into something like Morse in a code which Petra has intensively practised. When her ear lobe vibrates, she visualises in her mind’s eye the coded move. A move conventionally written, for example, as Nd2xe4 (a Knight capturing a piece on e4).

The system is almost perfect. There is that slight buzz of the tapper batting against her ear but experience has shown that hardly anyone can hear it. Especially if there is any kind of background noise or a distraction.

This is the mode of use. Hans sits in the audience, entering moves as they appear on the big screen into his modified mint box. Hans considers the countermove Leela proposes back. No mean player himself, he uses a ‘surprise’ heuristic. Mostly the suggestions are what he would expect Petra to play anyway and he just lets his daughter get on with it. But occasionally something utterly counterintuitive emerges, something profoundly alien. And that is passed to Petra who proceeds to confound her opponent and commentators alike.

Her intuition has a great career ahead of it, he thinks.

7: The Third Day: Daniel

Daniel had just lost a match he had anticipated - had assumed - he would comfortably win. He retired to his room disoriented, his expectations thoroughly violated. Initially his state-of-mind was simply frozen - but gradually a dormant emotion emerged: shame. Somehow he must have made a mistake.

His intellect raced - but to no avail. He was exhausted. He reviewed the game on his laptop and could make no sense of it. Fatigue sapped his every intuition. Eventually he fortified himself on room-service pap and settled into an armchair, prepared to lose the evening in some pulp fantasy the size of a brick. When that failed he was early to bed.

After a fitful night, he felt considerably sharper the next morning. His subconscious had been busy and suspicions had accumulated. First he ran the game again, using traditional chess engines (Stockfish, Komodo) to play her moves. As he expected, the engines’ moves were solid rather than flashy, merciless grind rather than innovative flair. There was little concordance with the Petra of the previous day.

He moved on to Maia. This was a neural-network chess engine trained not by self-play but by digesting human matches. Let no-one say that Daniel was not diligent in his preparations. His Maia configuration has been trained on Petra’s published games (along with many others of course). It was in fair agreement with most of yesterday’s game-play when he set it to play as Petra. But it missed all of her stunning innovations. Daniel’s intuitions grew stronger - he sensed where this was going. He now turned to Leela Chess Zero.

Leela Chess Zero is not one thing. There are different forks of the codebase plus an ever-changing menagerie of plug-in neural-net modules. Daniel used the most powerful (the highest rated) configuration currently in stable release... and quickly discovered how it might have been used. The AI engine did not of course recapitulate Petra’s entire game (left to itself it would have been far more innovative - and would have pulverised Daniel or any other human player) but at those points where Petra had done something unexpected, the program produced moves not dissimilar in elegant genius.

Daniel now took careful stock. Was there anything in Petra’s history which suggested an innate, quirky and superhuman talent? He reviewed her record with fresh eyes, but as far as he could tell the answer was no. He was forced to the only possible conclusion: she had to be cheating. Subtly and with help no doubt, but there could be no other explanation. And then he recalled the faint, subliminal buzzing he had heard. The answer had been there all along in the earrings.

Daniel picked up the hotel phone and called the championship director, Pierre Étaix.

---

The full story text (part two of my novel) is also available here:

• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a PDF, and
• "Donatien's Children" (2022) - as a formatted book on Amazon for easier reading.

---