{
  "id": "elite-20261029",
  "title": "Elite continuation: six hours, one matched comparison",
  "date": "2026-10-29",
  "kind": "training",
  "status": "completed",
  "hypothesis": "A broad Lichess foundation can benefit from continued next-move training on a curated Elite corpus.",
  "baseline": "Continue foundation weights 857bc93bfffb287dc67e2845a14c214a4691bc1a008dae1fa4d044e5fccc87d2 with fresh AdamW and scheduler. Compare against foundation and September on the same frozen 100-game Sunfish suite.",
  "data": "Nikonoel Elite newest-first subset: November 2025 through partial October 2024, cutoff 2024-10-16T01:56:24 UTC. 3,721,125 training games / 1,000,000,401 targets; 37,959 validation games / 10,227,153 targets. No additional rating, BOT, speed or completed-result filters; standard-start legality, context, exact deduplication and historical holdouts still apply.",
  "config": {
    "architecture": "unchanged causal decoder-only Transformer",
    "parameters": 85940736,
    "context_tokens": 1024,
    "vocabulary": 128,
    "tokens_per_ply": 3,
    "initial_checkpoint_sha256": "857bc93bfffb287dc67e2845a14c214a4691bc1a008dae1fa4d044e5fccc87d2",
    "optimizer": "fresh AdamW, not optimizer resume",
    "precision": "BF16 autocast; FP32 model and optimizer",
    "microbatch_per_rank": 4,
    "ranks": 2,
    "accumulation": 4,
    "games_per_update": 32,
    "learning_rate_floor": 0.00001,
    "selection": "lowest completed validation NLL",
    "benchmark_games": 100,
    "benchmark_helper_plies": 3,
    "production_helper_plies": 7
  },
  "compute": "Two RTX 4090 GPUs; 5h 58m 05.915s within six-hour deadline. 109,393 updates, 3,500,576 unique games and 940,645,697 target exposures, no repeated epoch. Selected checkpoint: update 103,873; 893,361,947 targets.",
  "results": [
    {
      "label": "Initial validation NLL",
      "value": 0.6061916479
    },
    {
      "label": "Selected validation NLL",
      "value": 0.5300231569
    },
    {
      "label": "Selected update",
      "value": 103873
    },
    {
      "label": "Matched Sunfish wins",
      "value": 27
    },
    {
      "label": "Matched Sunfish draws",
      "value": 9
    },
    {
      "label": "Matched Sunfish losses",
      "value": 63
    },
    {
      "label": "Matched Sunfish unfinished",
      "value": 1
    },
    {
      "label": "Raw greedy legal queries",
      "value": 3228
    },
    {
      "label": "Model queries",
      "value": 3321
    },
    {
      "label": "Three-ply helper overrides",
      "value": 46
    }
  ],
  "limitations": [
    "No reasoning traces or search supervision; this is next-move imitation.",
    "Extra compute and curated data selection are confounded; no equal-compute foundation-only control.",
    "The selected 100-game suite is small; paired approximate 95% intervals include zero. No Elo or general-strength claim.",
    "Benchmark used the frozen three-ply helper; production uses a different iterative seven-ply helper.",
    "Elite-specific launch receipts and Elite weight/data packages are not yet public reproduction downloads. Shared foundation code links are labeled as lineage, not an exact Elite launcher snapshot."
  ],
  "checkpoint": "c0a3f67ac4b364276028950b2010c5644e03efb3ca0f1228b32c36b8b5340238",
  "sourceSnapshot": "foundation-20261029",
  "history": [
    {
      "step": 0,
      "nll": 0.6061916479
    },
    {
      "step": 103873,
      "nll": 0.5300231569
    }
  ],
  "evidence": [
    {
      "label": "elite-continuation-final.json",
      "sha256": "4ef743033fd996be706bdee71ebc3c5e14998ea2e4a63743d07a6ceea7600ea7",
      "selectedFields": {
        "run_id": "4c98f8d6-6928-4cda-9ad7-464fcb4b68e5",
        "started_utc": "2026-10-29T08:32:30.238864+00:00",
        "training_finished_utc": "2026-10-29T14:30:33.423166+00:00",
        "supervision_receipt_utc": "2026-10-29T14:30:36.154146+00:00",
        "total_wall_seconds_to_supervision_receipt": 21485.91528224945,
        "status": "total_deadline_soft_stop",
        "initial_validation_nll": 0.6061916478773295,
        "best_validation_nll": 0.5300231569387555,
        "unique_training_corpus_targets": 1000000401,
        "unique_training_corpus_games": 3721125,
        "no_repeated_epoch": true,
        "best_checkpoint_sha256": "c0a3f67ac4b364276028950b2010c5644e03efb3ca0f1228b32c36b8b5340238",
        "last_checkpoint_sha256": "70594c0e81c9ce94b97cbe8a3eea791f439e187a934d6d51c79c8961135787a7",
        "test_model_evaluated": false
      }
    },
    {
      "label": "elite-evaluation-v1/completion-evidence.json",
      "sha256": "d6535b441cdf73385d274a94932ead8921577355bd8582732313a4ec54dcdbf6",
      "selectedFields": {
        "status": "verified_complete",
        "run_id": "f773d9a1-c778-4aca-a19d-1ac509bd4530",
        "started_utc": "2026-10-29T14:31:54.149562+00:00",
        "supervision_completed_utc": "2026-10-29T15:17:50.165829+00:00",
        "wall_seconds": 2756.016267299652,
        "all_100_individual_and_combined_pgns_verified": true,
        "score_difference_bounds": [
          5,
          7
        ],
        "uncertainty_limit": "Normal approximation over 50 selected opening pairs, showing all endpoint assumptions for the two unfinished games; not an Elo estimate, not a randomized data-selection control."
      }
    }
  ]
}