Google's AlphaGo team has been working on chess

[sasachess]

Evaluation speed:
AlphaZero 80K
Stockfish 70.000K

What?!

[Fulvio]

Today is a big day in computer chess:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf

"Instead of a handcrafted evaluation function and move ordering heuristics, AlphaZero utilises a deep neural network (p,v) = fθ(s) with parameters θ.
This neural network takes the board position s as an input and outputs a vector of move probabilities p with components pa = Pr(a|s) for each action a, and a scalar value v estimating the expected outcome z from position s"

This seems normal to me.

"Instead of an alpha-beta search with domain-specific enhancements, AlphaZero uses a general-purpose Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm. Each search consists of a series of simulated games of self-play that traverse a tree from root to leaf. Each simulation proceeds by selecting in each state a move with low visit count, high move probability and high value" [emphasis mine]

This is interesting. If I understand it correctly, it basically goes deeper only after reaching a high level of hash table hits.


"AlphaZero vs Stockfish: 25 win for AlphaZero, 25 draw, 0 loss (each program was given 1 minute of thinking time per move, strongest skill level using 64 threads and a hash size of 1GB)"

This is sci-fi. I do not have a 64 core machine but on my pc Stockfish do not sacrifice a Knight for 2 pawns:
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nf6 4.d3 Bc5 5.Bxc6 dxc6 6.O-O Nd7 7.Nbd2 O-O 8.Qe1 f6 9.Nc4 Rf7 10.a4 Bf8 11.Kh1 Nc5 12.a5 Ne6 13.Ncxe5?

[Guenther]

Today is a big day in computer chess:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf

"Instead of a handcrafted evaluation function and move ordering heuristics, AlphaZero utilises a deep neural network (p,v) = fθ(s) with parameters θ.
This neural network takes the board position s as an input and outputs a vector of move probabilities p with components pa = Pr(a|s) for each action a, and a scalar value v estimating the expected outcome z from position s"

This seems normal to me.

"Instead of an alpha-beta search with domain-specific enhancements, AlphaZero uses a general-purpose Monte-Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm. Each search consists of a series of simulated games of self-play that traverse a tree from root to leaf. Each simulation proceeds by selecting in each state a move with low visit count, high move probability and high value" [emphasis mine]

This is interesting. If I understand it correctly, it basically goes deeper only after reaching a high level of hash table hits.


"AlphaZero vs Stockfish: 25 win for AlphaZero, 25 draw, 0 loss (each program was given 1 minute of thinking time per move, strongest skill level using 64 threads and a hash size of 1GB)"

This is sci-fi. I do not have a 64 core machine but on my pc Stockfish do not sacrifice a Knight for 2 pawns:
1.e4 e5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 Nf6 4.d3 Bc5 5.Bxc6 dxc6 6.O-O Nd7 7.Nbd2 O-O 8.Qe1 f6 9.Nc4 Rf7 10.a4 Bf8 11.Kh1 Nc5 12.a5 Ne6 13.Ncxe5?

The paper is very interesting. Nevertheless selecting only wins and stripping off all game infos from the pgn might do for non-chess scientists,
but here it is quite useless and remains doubtful.

I hope there is more to come with more details for the games and the setup.

[mar]

While this is indeed incredible, show me how it beats SF dev with good book and syzygy on equal hardware in a 1000 game match.

Alternatively winning next TCEC should do

[Daniel Shawul]

Most of us here suspected that this could happen once Giraffe showed it can beat Stockfish's eval.

Just the fact that the new approch to chess programming worked incredibly well is fantastic even if it didn't beat the best.

Daniel

[Daniel Shawul]

While this is indeed incredible, show me how it beats SF dev with good book and syzygy on equal hardware in a 1000 game match.

Alternatively winning next TCEC should do

"equal hardware", "same book", "same tb" wasn't an issue for WCCC, why now ?

[mar]

"equal hardware", "same book", "same tb" wasn't an issue for WCCC, why now ?

They are scientists so it would be nice to compare apples to apples.

So far we know that AlphaZero is able to beat SF8 without book and tbs on their hardware in a 100 game match (while the result is significant, more games would be better)

[EvgeniyZh]

While this is indeed incredible, show me how it beats SF dev with good book and syzygy on equal hardware in a 1000 game match.

Alternatively winning next TCEC should do

You suppose to run Stockfish on GPU?)

They are scientists so it would be nice to compare apples to apples.

AlphaZero din't used neither book nor syzygy, neither did stockfish. That sounds like apples to apples.

[mar]

While this is indeed incredible, show me how it beats SF dev with good book and syzygy on equal hardware in a 1000 game match.

Alternatively winning next TCEC should do

You suppose to run Stockfish on GPU?)

They are scientists so it would be nice to compare apples to apples.

AlphaZero din't used neither book nor syzygy, neither did stockfish. That sounds like apples to apples.

Obviously I'd like to see AlphaZero running on a CPU (because running SF on a TPU won't happen) and still beating SF, while allowing SF to use every means to play the best chess it can, leaving zero doubt.

I wonder if they could do it, maybe not at the moment but probably soon.

Considering the hardware at their disposal, a 100 game match seems rather short.

I'm shocked what they could accomplish without alphabeta though.

[EvgeniyZh]

While this is indeed incredible, show me how it beats SF dev with good book and syzygy on equal hardware in a 1000 game match.

Alternatively winning next TCEC should do

You suppose to run Stockfish on GPU?)

They are scientists so it would be nice to compare apples to apples.

AlphaZero din't used neither book nor syzygy, neither did stockfish. That sounds like apples to apples.

Obviously I'd like to see AlphaZero running on a CPU (because running SF on a TPU won't happen) and still beating SF, while allowing SF to use every means to play the best chess it can, leaving zero doubt.

I wonder if they could do it, maybe not at the moment but probably soon.

Considering the hardware at their disposal, a 100 game match seems rather short.

I'm shocked what they could accomplish without alphabeta though.

Well, probably they should have give same FLOPS budget to both, that seems like the most fair you can get, given the inefficiency of switching hardware for either side.

Winning against latest Stockfish with opening book and endgame tables would be definitely even more impressive.