Deep learning and free software

leela-zero is effectively a client in a distributed effort to build neural network weights for leela-zero to use to play Go well. Effectively, there's no training data, since this is in the class of problems where the code can self-train without external data by playing itself.

So this is basically a distributed computing client as well as a Go engine that runs with the results of that distributed computing effort.

From a free software perspective, the major concerns I see for leela-zero are the ownership and reproducibility of the "central infrastructure" so that others could continue or proceed alternatively in this process without the help of the original creators.

That all of that work is going on in the public view on github with the tools exposed should go a long way towards alleviating practical concerns, but it would be nice if the server tools were packaged as well.