That Lc0 is "poor at tactics" is relative and maybe not that relevant. One can say that traditional engines are insanely strong at tactics, aren't they compared to humans? Lc0 on reasonable hardware still seems stronger than humans at tactics, but it is also stronger positionally, so, all in all, is a balanced chess playing entity from an unbiased human view. Traditional engines are a bit extremists, insanely tactically strong, and positionally often below even a regular human.hgm wrote: ↑Mon May 13, 2019 9:52 pm There shouldn't even have been a story.
LC0 is poor at tactics. So it is a poor chess program. PERIOD.
The initial statement was never withspoken. To the point would have been if you would have responded "Not at all, LC0 is brilliant at tactics. It is on par with the best engines in solving tactical positions". Instead the insane bla-bla started... But youy know what they say: "if you cannot dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit". You sure diplayed a good attempt at that, here.
There are other issues, to me more important, like many endgames and especially "chess variants" or "arbitrary legal chess positions" playing. As Crem pointed out, endgames can be corrected by some non-zero approach, and are already most often very good. Some variants can be learned by training specifically on them, and that would be interesting, as strong traditional engines are stronger on them than the "Chess Lc0", but I guess "Variant Lc0" can be stronger than the traditional engines. Nevertheless, that seems a flaw of at least Zero-NN approach, if not generally of NN machine learning: the result seems to lack "guiding principles", "abstraction", generalization. The approach is general, but the result is a "very narrow specialist", with Lc0 being a specialist in Chess from the standard opening position, or "Chess as defined".
Still, you have to appreciate it, I think in time Lc0 or similar will correct the whole opening theory, a thing traditional chess engines could have done only narrowly on some lines leading to complications. To me, the appearance of Lc0 is probably the greatest thing in the chess engine development as a "consumer" of the last 20 years I am following it from time to time.