Alpha0 iz basically behaving like huge highly selective opening book.kranium wrote:AlphaZero very selectively evaluating 80k vs Stockfish's 70,000k positions/sec, probably achieving tremendous depths at such speeds,
but I'd guess it's the deep (learned) positional eval which is primarily adding strength...
However, beside hardware other stuff are highly questionable in this work.
I guess ppl are a bit intimidated to ask question because it is Google, but many things are fishy and unfavourable to SF.
One big disadvantage was TC, 1min/move means SF spent only 1 minute for each of the opening moves while in normal TC like 40/40 it would spend easily 5-10 minutes per each of opening moves. That made it much weaker 20 maybe even 30Elo since most of loses for SF already happen in the opening.
Second is no-book play, where Alpha0 mainly forces openings and lines that it spent most of the time training and SF had no help from book whatsever, so in this case to make it at least a bit more fair one should use strong book such as Cerebellum as a support to SF.
Starting from 12 typical human openings (only 4 moves deep at max), the gap Alpha0 had over SF reduced from 100 to 77Elo which can be seen from the paper.
Third even though they used last year TCEC winner, SF8 has untested behaviour on 64 cores, and on that hardware is at least 30 if not more Elo weaker than the current SFdev.
So taking all into consideration it is pretty safe to assume that latest Brainfish at normal TC like 40/40 would be at list on par if not stronger than Alpha0. And all that on much weaker hardware.
If they really wanted to make fair comparison instead of running Alpha0 on regular x64 one could also run SF on custom hardware where all the evaluation is handled with fully custom implemented FPGAs (like DeepBlue did) and then one would see how much weaker Alpha0 really is, when comparison is not apples and oranges.