I tried with the 'old' SF8 here and even with 1 cpu setting it would never play 21. Be3??
Also it would always go for a dead draw by repetition with 16. Nf5+ (=) instead of the weaker 16. bxc3?
This raises some questions. Did they perhaps add extreme contempt to SF? Of course the whole setup could be erroneous anyways.
Thanks to Vincent for the lichess analysis pgn.
Stockfish greatly prefers Be3 on my i7 4930k w/12 threads
FEN: rnb2r2/p3b2p/1ppq1p1k/6p1/Q6P/2P3P1/P4PB1/R1B1R1K1 w - - 0 21
Jouni wrote:Sounds like april fool. But isn't !. I just read, that they are not interested in chess? But I read somewhere: So basically they played 400 cores engine vs 60 cores engine. Hmm..
Well, THAT EXPLAINS EVERYTHING.
I did not know that the hardware advantage was this huge one!
No, I don't believe in the Alpha project, on equal hardware, they might reach SF level in about couple of years at best.
Chess is much more difficult than go.
Vinvin wrote:
White is AlphaZero in this game and white won
oops my bad.
This means the excessive SF blunder here is 34...Rd8???
...
It's probably too late for black anyway, white has too many threats !
R+N undeveloped (and blocked) and the king is under attack.
Equal score in the eval is probably due to bad pruning/horizon effect/null-moves.
What is the usual time or depth lichess-SF8 uses for those annotations?
At a first quick glance it seems impossible that SF on good hardware
is even able to make some of the bad moves that are 'colported' from blank pgn.
From the annotations it looks more likely that in reality SF8 was AlphaChess and vice versa
I don't remember exactly but from my memory the analyse uses around 3 sec per move on a 2 GHz CPU.
The moves in the game has been played with Stockfish 8 on 64 CPUs 1 min/per move (quote from the paper : "In this section we include 10 example games played by AlphaZero against Stockfish during the 100 game match using 1 minute per move." )
70 Mnodes/sec for SF8 vs 80Knodes/sec for AlphaZero, see tables S4 in the paper : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf
I suppose it is Knodes for both?
Nps pretty much mean nothing here, we don't know what Alpha's search and evaluation is and even how it counts nodes.
Is it true that Alpha used 7 times stronger hardware?
Amidst all the hullabaloo, no one is noticing the first moves both engines have been playing.
Alpha chooses only 1.d4 and 1.Nf3, while Stockfish goes for 1.e4
Judging from this, I can say that Alpha is much weaker than SF in terms of software, and the only reason for the win is the very big hardware advantage.
I observed nothing special in the way Alpha plays in these 10 games, it is going for the same open positions as most engines, just that outcalculates Stockfish consistently.
This could be due only to substantial hardware advantage.