Playing devil's advocate. Yes it is genius, but the chess community is not looking for genius we are looking to revolutionise chess playing and alpha zero seems to have maxed out at a level not significantly higher than an old version of stockfish without a book.Albert Silver wrote: ↑Sun Dec 09, 2018 5:34 pm
Yet, that is what AlphaZero has done, and we are even able to bring this to the home user's PC thanks to Deep Mind's generosity with their knowledge, as well as the fantatsic Leela Chess community efforts. In other words that is not limited to some absurdly exotic hardware no one could ever hope to obtain. I am not even commenting on the whole self-learning process, which is what has been the focus.
What is more, to achieve this, you are looking at an incredibly evolved eval function (not precisely, but it helps illustrate the point) that has roughly 28 million values compared to a few thousand at most for even the most sophisticated predecessors. In all the years I have seen discussions on the fight between smart searchers and fast searchers, I have never seen anyone come close to imagining that is how enormous a difference it would take, much less realize and prove it.
It is pure genius.
A dazzling 'toy', but a 'toy' nevertheless.
The future may be different, but that remains to be seen.