Stockfish 18 vs Leela

Leela Chess Zero (Lc0) has a CCRL rating in the 3400–3500 range, placing it consistently among the top three engines in the world. Leela has won multiple Top Chess Engine Championship (TCEC) and Chess.com Computer Chess Championship titles, defeating Stockfish in several historic super-finals.

Leela Chess Zero was spearheaded by Gary Linscott (a Stockfish developer) and launched in early 2018. It is a free, open-source, community-driven project based on Google DeepMind's AlphaZero methodology. Leela learns chess through reinforcement learning from self-play, with contributions from thousands of volunteers worldwide.

Stockfish is an alpha-beta search engine with NNUE evaluation. Leela uses a deep neural network with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), originally inspired by AlphaZero. This gives Leela a distinctive positional and strategic style, while Stockfish excels in sharp tactical calculation. Together they represent the two dominant approaches in modern computer chess.

Leela performs best on a powerful GPU due to its neural network architecture. While it can run on CPU-only setups, its full strength is realized with modern NVIDIA GPUs supporting CUDA. Stockfish, by contrast, is a CPU-first engine optimized for multi-core processors.