AlphaZero - Tactactical Abilities

[Milos]

I bet that they publish more games along with that paper

Again, what would you like to bet? I'm really interested to bet you since I am pretty certain that we are never ever gonna see a single game of A0 published anywhere.

[Uri Blass]

I bet that they publish more games along with that paper

Again, what would you like to bet? I'm really interested to bet you since I am pretty certain that we are never ever gonna see a single game of A0 published anywhere.

I do not know what they are going to publish but I would like them to give option to download not only the games against stockfish but all the games that alphazero played against itself earlier in order to improve.

[Milos]

I do not know what they are going to publish but I would like them to give option to download not only the games against stockfish but all the games that alphazero played against itself earlier in order to improve.

Lol, everyone would like that, but that is never gonna happen.

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

Maybe AlphaZero just outsearched Stockfish a little bit. Just like Stockfish would against itself on better hardware.

Sorry, but I totally disagree.
It was much more than just a matter of outsearching Stockfish ; it was the whole, overall STYLE of Play that AlphaZero showed that was so impressive and breath-taking.
The Brilliant moves themselves like the famous 19. Re8 played in one of the Games, could be found by other Engines like Komodo and Houdini after suitable Tweaks to the Parameters.
But just finding those moves didn't make the tweaked Komodo or Houdini into a AlphaZero !
What impressed me the most was the almost complete disregard for Material Balance that AlphaZero exhibited.
This, more than any deficiencies in Search and Evaluation, I am convinced , completely unsettled Stockfish which was burdened with conventional ideas of material value.
It was as if AlphaZero, looking at the Board, foresaw ( I can't think of any other word) a Position that was favorable to it, and immediately started making (tactical) moves that would lead to that Position, without caring in the least how much material it threw away in the Process !
It was like putting the Brain of Mikhail Tal/Bobby Fischer into a Robot and calling it AlphaZero.
The Brilliance of the Human was there, but without any human weaknesses.
If you actually play through those Games, you can almost SENSE the discomfort, in a manner of speaking, that Stockfish was experiencing in playing against such an unusual opponent.
All the technical mumbo-jumbo about hardware differences or a lack of an Opening Book, or Time Control not suiting Stockfish or other such rubbish excuses can't hide the FACT that Stockfish was absolutely and comprehensively out-classed by the amazing AlphaZero.
Stockfish simply didn't know what hit it !
The people still having a vested interest in the now obsolete chess engines, fully realize this even if they don't admit it, and are desperately looking for excuses to explain this catastrophe (for them) and are hiding behind fake Analysis, calculations and other Technical mumbo-jumbo.
But Chess is more than just scientific calculations and one doesn't have to be a Programmer, just a reasonably good chess player, to know the Truth.

Now, the only thing that remains is that they offer it for 50 bucks to the general user.
But then, Kim will insist that it costs more...

It was outsearching, of course, not out-knowledging.
Alpha has much inferior knowledge to SF, there is not the slightest doubt about that.

Looking at the games, I see no advanced evaluation/knowledge patterns at all:
- no material imbalances
- no closed positions
- no advanced king safety concepts
- no sophisticated pawn structures

Alpha understands very well evaluation-wise 2 things:
- bishop pair
- and refined psqt, especially for pawns(just the general pawn)

So that, no knowledge in Alpha, it was all outsearching.

It is so funny when people still believe Alpha has achieved some breakthrough. No breakthrough, just tremendous computer power.

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

Sorry, but I totally disagree.
It was much more than just a matter of outsearching Stockfish ; it was the whole, overall STYLE of Play that AlphaZero showed that was so impressive and breath-taking.
The Brilliant moves themselves like the famous 19. Re8 played in one of the Games, could be found by other Engines like Komodo and Houdini after suitable Tweaks to the Parameters.
But just finding those moves didn't make the tweaked Komodo or Houdini into a AlphaZero !
What impressed me the most was the almost complete disregard for Material Balance that AlphaZero exhibited.
This, more than any deficiencies in Search and Evaluation, I am convinced , completely unsettled Stockfish which was burdened with conventional ideas of material value.
It was as if AlphaZero, looking at the Board, foresaw ( I can't think of any other word) a Position that was favorable to it, and immediately started making (tactical) moves that would lead to that Position, without caring in the least how much material it threw away in the Process !
It was like putting the Brain of Mikhail Tal/Bobby Fischer into a Robot and calling it AlphaZero.
The Brilliance of the Human was there, but without any human weaknesses.
If you actually play through those Games, you can almost SENSE the discomfort, in a manner of speaking, that Stockfish was experiencing in playing against such an unusual opponent.
All the technical mumbo-jumbo about hardware differences or a lack of an Opening Book, or Time Control not suiting Stockfish or other such rubbish excuses can't hide the FACT that Stockfish was absolutely and comprehensively out-classed by the amazing AlphaZero.
Stockfish simply didn't know what hit it !
The people still having a vested interest in the now obsolete chess engines, fully realize this even if they don't admit it, and are desperately looking for excuses to explain this catastrophe (for them) and are hiding behind fake Analysis, calculations and other Technical mumbo-jumbo.
But Chess is more than just scientific calculations and one doesn't have to be a Programmer, just a reasonably good chess player, to know the Truth.

These are the kinds of posts I am talking about. The above is much too imprecise, almost fangirling

The approach of AlphaZero is not magic. It consists of two very concrete things: A tree search algorithm and a function that evaluates positions. It's tactical abilities come mainly from the first, it's "understanding" of a chess position from the second.

It would be very impressive if it could just look at each of the legal moves in the position it is currently playing and then just pick the best one or at least good enough to beat the best opponents. But that is far from the case. It needs to do a tree search to figure out the tactics, even if they are tactics only according to its own valuation of positions.

Even a positionally weaker engine will often win against a positionally better one if the first is just allowed to search a little deeper. And it will look as if it is positionally smarter doing so. When AlphaZero plays its king to e3 against the French defense, it might not automatically be because that's the brilliant thing to do by some novelty general principles, but primarily because it saw no tactics against it. It might even be a bug in the engine that ended up not being a problem because AlphaZero was tactically strong enough to avoid it in the rest of the game. I am not saying that that is definitely the case. I am just saying that it is very hard to tell the difference between an engine just searching a little deeper in the important lines handling all important tactics and then an engine that has the godlike, magical positional understanding that people wants to believe that AlphaZero has. If AlphaZero had played the king to e3 and then much later in the game lost because of some unrelated positional feature or even tactics, the king to e3 move would not have been praised as uncritically as it has.

My point is not to suggest that AlphaZero has bugs or that it is weak or something like that. My point is that we know very little at this stage about how strong it really is and why that is. People hear that it is a new approach, they hear AI, neural networks, deep learning, that it has only trained for four hours (which is debatable) and so on. And they want to believe. So they read all sorts of things into the very few published games played.

Precisely, Anil is a fangirl.
Or, it might play Ke3, because other moves are simply significantly worse. SF might not see that, but add 10 plies more to the search, or even just 5 or 3, and you don't need precise evaluation.
The specific position was not that deep, after all, and the good moves were limited.

'The Secret of Chess' has an evaluation term for this position: king on the central e or d files, with the file it is on as well as the 2 adjacent files closed with pairs of blocked pawns gets some nice king safety bonus, 30-50cps or so.

So that, if you have good evaluation, you don't need search; and if you have sufficiently deep search, like Alpha had, you don't need sophisticated evaluation that much.

But again, the funny thing is that 80% of the games were already won in the very early opening, but you can not convince of that people who believe Alpha excels in the endgame...

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

Maybe AlphaZero just outsearched Stockfish a little bit. Just like Stockfish would against itself on better hardware.

Sorry, but I totally disagree.
It was much more than just a matter of outsearching Stockfish ; it was the whole, overall STYLE of Play that AlphaZero showed that was so impressive and breath-taking.
The Brilliant moves themselves like the famous 19. Re8 played in one of the Games, could be found by other Engines like Komodo and Houdini after suitable Tweaks to the Parameters.
But just finding those moves didn't make the tweaked Komodo or Houdini into a AlphaZero !
What impressed me the most was the almost complete disregard for Material Balance that AlphaZero exhibited.
This, more than any deficiencies in Search and Evaluation, I am convinced , completely unsettled Stockfish which was burdened with conventional ideas of material value.
It was as if AlphaZero, looking at the Board, foresaw ( I can't think of any other word) a Position that was favorable to it, and immediately started making (tactical) moves that would lead to that Position, without caring in the least how much material it threw away in the Process !
It was like putting the Brain of Mikhail Tal/Bobby Fischer into a Robot and calling it AlphaZero.
The Brilliance of the Human was there, but without any human weaknesses.
If you actually play through those Games, you can almost SENSE the discomfort, in a manner of speaking, that Stockfish was experiencing in playing against such an unusual opponent.
All the technical mumbo-jumbo about hardware differences or a lack of an Opening Book, or Time Control not suiting Stockfish or other such rubbish excuses can't hide the FACT that Stockfish was absolutely and comprehensively out-classed by the amazing AlphaZero.
Stockfish simply didn't know what hit it !
The people still having a vested interest in the now obsolete chess engines, fully realize this even if they don't admit it, and are desperately looking for excuses to explain this catastrophe (for them) and are hiding behind fake Analysis, calculations and other Technical mumbo-jumbo.
But Chess is more than just scientific calculations and one doesn't have to be a Programmer, just a reasonably good chess player, to know the Truth.

I only know that we saw a selective part of the games.
We did not see all the draws of alphazero against stockfish.

I do not think that the result as catastrophe for somebody and we simply do not have all the details.

I do not think that the decision of alphazero developers to give only games that alphazero won was a correct decision
and I think that if you look only at games that a player won you can get a biased opinion about the player.

Right, they should have included 3 wins and 7 draws.
But then, the verdict would have been: "It barely beat SF".

[hgm]

So that, no knowledge in Alpha, it was all outsearching.

It is so funny when people still believe Alpha has achieved some breakthrough. No breakthrough, just tremendous computer power.

So Stockfish was outsearched by an opponent that searched a ~1000 times smaller tree (80kps for AlphaZero vs 70Mnps for Stockfish).

Shouldn't that count as a beakthrough?

But then, the verdict would have been: "It barely beat SF".

That still does't sound very bad for something that 9 hours earlier had sub-zero Elo, only knew the rules and was never taught anything to improve it...

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

People hear that it is a new approach, they hear AI, neural networks, deep learning, that it has only trained for four hours (which is debatable) and so on. And they want to believe. So they read all sorts of things into the very few published games played.

People not only hear, they also SEE . They have HEARD all that you said and also SEEN how the once mighty Stockfish was not just beaten, but completely HUMILIATED !
The Proof of the Pudding is in the eating.
The people who believe are not all fools, as you seem to suggest.
Also, the highlighted words clearly display your bias, in the sense that you clearly disbelieve what is written in the Paper.
When you don't even believe what was written, what are we arguing about ?
You are no different from a Milos or a Tsvetkov and just pretend to be unbiased, but Lady, your Slip is showing !

Anil, SF is 400 elos stronger than Alpha with the same conditions, AT LEAST, so please stop trolling.
No knowledge in Alpha, no breakthrough, it won 80% of its games in the early opening, due to its opening knowledge.

I can hardly think of a more unfair competition.

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

You do know that this was just a preprint and not the entire paper ? Why can't people wait until DeepMind has published the entire paper before accusing DeepMind of not doing a good job.

I bet that we will see many many more games published by DeepMind so watch out

No one is accusing AlphaZero of not doing a good job?
It is very telling how some people choose to read the points given in this thread.

My main point is that we don't know very much at this stage and that people are jumping to conclusions and are extrapolating groundlessly.

AlphaZero might be positionally godlike or it might just be a tiny bit better tactically for much more mundane reasons. We don't know at this point.
We also don't know how strong it really is and we can't conclude anything about it yet, even though a lot of people do. It might be just a little bit stronger than the version of Stockfish it played against or it might be much, much better so that even if/when we test it against stronger and stronger opponents, we wouldn't hit it's peak strength until much later. People seem to assume this blindly, but we simply don't know at this point. We have seen it a million times in computer chess: An engine which is a little bit better, especially tactically, can dominate it's opponent and seem to have a much better positional understanding.

Imagine playing my old engine Chezzz against Stockfish at a hardware disadvantage over 100 games. The hardware disadvantage in this case handpicked so that the result ends up something like 72 wins/28 draws/0 losses for Chezzz. This is easy to do. It might mean that Chezzz runs at a modern PC and that Stockfish runs on my old HTC Desire phone or even worse. Chezzz most certainly doesn't have superior positional understanding compared to Stockfish (quite the opposite). Not in general and not in this scenario. What it does have in this scenario is a tactical advantage. You can even calculate how much better Chezzz is in this scenario in terms of rating (in a given rating pool, ratings are not fixed quantities as some people seem to think).

We have _no_ objective, scientific way of testing at this point how strong AlphaZero actually is or if it is primarily for tactical reasons (how it deals with the search tree) or for positional reasons (how the neural network evaluates positions). And I know that these two are related and that there isn't a clear line between tactical and positional features, but you get the idea.

Thanks for Chezzz, I have played some games against it in the past, funny thing...

I guess it is clear that 30 times higher speed accelerates tactics.
Maybe many people will not be able to quite make the distinction, but I am fully convinced Alpha's 'neural network'(is that all about?) is very primitive. Maybe it has more terms/rules, but for the most part, they are primitive. The games simply point into that direction. Apart from Ke3 and the strong d4-e5-f6 chain in the same game, not even a trace of some special evaluation patterns.
It was all outcalculation.

Why don't they try to tune their 'neural network' on a PC?
You bet SF, Komodo and Houdini will not advance significantly faster, given Alpha's hardware.

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

I bet that we will see many many more games published by DeepMind so watch out

Are you working in DeepMind?
What would you like to bet, I'm interested?

They have installed brokers on each and every forum.