It is exactly as ridiculous/funny as this entire book discussion. It is claimed that one Chess-playig entity was significantly 'handicapped' because it had to play some of the moves itself, rather than having them played on its behalf by a completely different entity that is supposed to be better at them.
There was a common expectation for SF to have an opening book to be strong from starting position. All the tournament/rating list/playchess engine room/correspondence w/e games were played with knowledge that you have to have an opening book if you want to be competitive. The common accepted view was that it's better for the book to come from 3rd parties instead of SF team trying to come up with one. SF testing itself is done with an opening book.
The whole situation is akin to someone claiming they can beat an F1 car and then running the tests on a muddy rally track. Yeah, they won but they didn't get what F1 car is good at. It was never optimized for it the same way chess engines were never optimized to be as strong as possible from the starting position.
It's funny how this completely obvious point is discussed why the topic of time control is rarely considered. Time is part of the game and the expectation for chess engines was that they do time management themselves. The tournament/rating list/playchess etc. games were played in conditions where the chess engines had to manage their time and that's why SF team spent some time to implement it unlike the opening book.
It's sad that the publicity stunt Google pulled seems to work. Defending them you are contributing to the terrible academic and corporate culture where deceiving the wide public is more profitable than intellectual honesty. Just ask yourself this: if I claimed I can beat your engine in a match you would want to establish the terms. You would ask about opening books and tablebases and we would establish something. Being honest people we wouldn't modify our engines to hide opening book in them. If we didn't trust each other we would agree on executable size for example and then do w/e we could within those constraints.
Btw, Deepmind recently claimed to solve (for practical purposes) protein folding. Unlike chess I don't know anything about that. Trying to widen my understanding of the world I would like to know if they really solved it, if their progress is really meaningful and how big a deal it is. Remembering how intellectually dishonest PR stunt they pulled with one of the oldest computer science challenges I am very skeptical to accept their claims so should be everyone else. The stakes with this one are actually quite high unlike chess and we all know people who only deceive when it doesn't matter are a rare breed.
What's even worse I can't even trust what experts in the field say seeing how supposed experts in chess programming field are so high on DeepMind's koolaid even 2-3 years after the event.
Agreed 100%... that was the debate at the time and the battle still rages in the present day...could you "train" Alpha Zero in 24 hours to defeat Stockfish 8? Were the Match Conditions fair? Was the result legit? My analysis back in 2017-2018 was that is indeed was not a Legit Result ("Apples With Apples, Oranges with Oranges") TPU vs CPU vs GPU's and no opening book for SF 8 vs experience .net for Alpha Zero....I will give Deep Mind Their Kudos..That "Experiment" has indeed changed the course of Chess history and the future path of Computer Chess (perhaps for the better) and LC0 (Alpha Zeros Offspring) continues to make excellent Progress with LC0 v0.26.3 rc2 playing extremely strong and interesting chess at present, I must admit that my experiments were unable to Recreate Deep Minds Fantastic Results over the board..others have stated that they did have impressive results with LC0 even back in 2018...today most of the players in playchess are still using Stockfish engines or SF Clones of some sort...My tests show Stockfish (SF Dev) still "Rules The Roost" even with the NNUE influence of the current day. AR
Damn I was mislead by the bump and in shitty mood this morning. Thanks for pointing out it's an old comment.
I am still bitter as hell about how Deepmind used chess for publicity showing no intellectual honesty and not giving players even a few thousand games.
Still thanks to them we have Leela today so it as turned out for the better.
