My take on the whole "End of an era" thing.

[Leo]

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[jp]

I don't think it's right to generalize Lc0 weaknesses to weaknesses of all NN engines.

Yes, Lc0 has weak spots, but I don't think they are inherent to neural networks, it's just something to fix

But for now Lc is all we have. Do you have any reason to believe that A0 does not have the same weaknesses Lc has?

Lc0 and A0 are very similar, so "bugs" (e.g. due to not handling transpositions or opening-biased training poisition picking) may be common.
But it's also possible that Lc0 has some bugs that A0 didn't have. E.g. during WCC in London Demis Hassabis said to one of Lc0 devs that A0 didn't have endgame problems.

We might believe him if we got to see A0 playing 1000s of endgames without problems. We don't know it doesn't have problems and maybe he doesn't either. We have seen only a tiny fraction of the games it played, but the games won't give full info anyway because they are adjudicated, which means they avoid much of the endgame.

[Uri Blass]

More important is that the NN-based engines aren't really very good at Chess in general: they seem to be quite inferior for analyzing arbitrary positions. The one thing they are good at is playing games from the opening position, because that allows them to avoid the large fraction of positions where they would suck. But who wants that?

I do not think that we can generalize about future NN engines from lc0.

I think that the main problem is that lc0 is trained to play chess and not a different game that is similiar to chess.

I suggest the following game to train about that is not exactly chess because of different scoring rules and the fact that you have probability of 50% not to start from the opening position.

In every game you start from the opening position with probability of 50% and from random position from a big pgn with probability of 50%
You continue games until mate.
In case that you win the number of moves is important and the score is not 1 or 0.

I suggest a score of 0.5+0.5*(0.99^number of moves) for the side that wins the game so there is going to be a big difference between winning in 100 moves and winning in 200 moves and if lc0 continue trolling instead of trying to find the fastest mate it is going to lose matches inspite of having more wins than the opponent.

[corres]

More important is that the NN-based engines aren't really very good at Chess in general: they seem to be quite inferior for analyzing arbitrary positions. The one thing they are good at is playing games from the opening position, because that allows them to avoid the large fraction of positions where they would suck. But who wants that?

Obviously the inferiority of NN engines for analyzing (that is in arbitrary position) depends on the dimension and structure of NN. In the case of an NN engine with bigger and better structured NN this issue is smaller.
We can hope the development of NN engine will reduce this issue.

1. Obviously. Haha.
2. Obviously. Haha.
3. Hopium.

Adding more layers to the tower, faster processors and bigger and better structure (your words) will get you closer to knowledge in much the same way as adding to the Tower of Babel will get you closer to heaven.

Yes, obviously you can not disregard your political prejudice and your injured vanity even when we dispute strictly technical questions either.
There are some excuse for you that you are not the only one on this site but it is not a wise thing mainly from a "smart"...
And it is not a hahaha but a sad thing.

[chrisw]

More important is that the NN-based engines aren't really very good at Chess in general: they seem to be quite inferior for analyzing arbitrary positions. The one thing they are good at is playing games from the opening position, because that allows them to avoid the large fraction of positions where they would suck. But who wants that?

Obviously the inferiority of NN engines for analyzing (that is in arbitrary position) depends on the dimension and structure of NN. In the case of an NN engine with bigger and better structured NN this issue is smaller.
We can hope the development of NN engine will reduce this issue.

1. Obviously. Haha.
2. Obviously. Haha.
3. Hopium.

Adding more layers to the tower, faster processors and bigger and better structure (your words) will get you closer to knowledge in much the same way as adding to the Tower of Babel will get you closer to heaven.

Yes, obviously you can not disregard your political prejudice and your injured vanity even when we dispute strictly technical questions either.
There are some excuse for you that you are not the only one on this site but it is not a wise thing mainly from a "smart"...
And it is not a hahaha but a sad thing.

Que, political prejudice? Do your politics on CTF, here it is a technical topic.
Look, the comments 1 and 2 above are assertions made without base, failing also on Tower of Babel theory. It’s not that you are wrong, it’s that the foundations for the assertions are lacking and therefore undiscussable.

[adams161]

More important is that the NN-based engines aren't really very good at Chess in general: they seem to be quite inferior for analyzing arbitrary positions. The one thing they are good at is playing games from the opening position, because that allows them to avoid the large fraction of positions where they would suck. But who wants that?

Obviously the inferiority of NN engines for analyzing (that is in arbitrary position) depends on the dimension and structure of NN. In the case of an NN engine with bigger and better structured NN this issue is smaller.
We can hope the development of NN engine will reduce this issue.

1. Obviously. Haha.
2. Obviously. Haha.
3. Hopium.

Adding more layers to the tower, faster processors and bigger and better structure (your words) will get you closer to knowledge in much the same way as adding to the Tower of Babel will get you closer to heaven.

Yes, obviously you can not disregard your political prejudice and your injured vanity even when we dispute strictly technical questions either.
There are some excuse for you that you are not the only one on this site but it is not a wise thing mainly from a "smart"...
And it is not a hahaha but a sad thing.

Que, political prejudice? Do your politics on CTF, here it is a technical topic.
Look, the comments 1 and 2 above are assertions made without base, failing also on Tower of Babel theory. It’s not that you are wrong, it’s that the foundations for the assertions are lacking and therefore un-discussable.

I wrote a classical chess engine, http://www.LanternChess.com/pulsar/ and now they tell me there are these other ones. My only thought is when am I going to have to support this in one of my apps and you guys wont be happy which stockfish anymore. They do sound pretty good with some of the results. And of course we've all seen the news of beating stockfish. But I understand they are larger things and done fit on android and iOS devices as much.

Now as to the assertions that don't have any premises so cant be discussed, well i think you can discuss them about as well as i have here and that is about it.

[adams161]

More important is that the NN-based engines aren't really very good at Chess in general: they seem to be quite inferior for analyzing arbitrary positions. The one thing they are good at is playing games from the opening position, because that allows them to avoid the large fraction of positions where they would suck. But who wants that?

Obviously the inferiority of NN engines for analyzing (that is in arbitrary position) depends on the dimension and structure of NN. In the case of an NN engine with bigger and better structured NN this issue is smaller.
We can hope the development of NN engine will reduce this issue.

1. Obviously. Haha.
2. Obviously. Haha.
3. Hopium.

Adding more layers to the tower, faster processors and bigger and better structure (your words) will get you closer to knowledge in much the same way as adding to the Tower of Babel will get you closer to heaven.

Yes, obviously you can not disregard your political prejudice and your injured vanity even when we dispute strictly technical questions either.
There are some excuse for you that you are not the only one on this site but it is not a wise thing mainly from a "smart"...
And it is not a hahaha but a sad thing.

Que, political prejudice? Do your politics on CTF, here it is a technical topic.
Look, the comments 1 and 2 above are assertions made without base, failing also on Tower of Babel theory. It’s not that you are wrong, it’s that the foundations for the assertions are lacking and therefore un-discussable.

I wrote a classical chess engine, http://www.LanternChess.com/pulsar/ and now they tell me there are these other ones. My only thought is when am I going to have to support this in one of my apps and you guys wont be happy which stockfish anymore. They do sound pretty good with some of the results. And of course we've all seen the news of beating stockfish. But I understand they are larger things and don't fit on Android and iOS devices as much.

Now as to the assertions that don't have any foundations, so cant be discussed, well I think you can discuss them about as well as I have here and that is about it.

[corres]

More important is that the NN-based engines aren't really very good at Chess in general: they seem to be quite inferior for analyzing arbitrary positions. The one thing they are good at is playing games from the opening position, because that allows them to avoid the large fraction of positions where they would suck. But who wants that?

Obviously the inferiority of NN engines for analyzing (that is in arbitrary position) depends on the dimension and structure of NN. In the case of an NN engine with bigger and better structured NN this issue is smaller.
We can hope the development of NN engine will reduce this issue.

1. Obviously. Haha.
2. Obviously. Haha.
3. Hopium.

Adding more layers to the tower, faster processors and bigger and better structure (your words) will get you closer to knowledge in much the same way as adding to the Tower of Babel will get you closer to heaven.

Yes, obviously you can not disregard your political prejudice and your injured vanity even when we dispute strictly technical questions either.
There are some excuse for you that you are not the only one on this site but it is not a wise thing mainly from a "smart"...
And it is not a hahaha but a sad thing.

Que, political prejudice? Do your politics on CTF, here it is a technical topic.
Look, the comments 1 and 2 above are assertions made without base, failing also on Tower of Babel theory. It’s not that you are wrong, it’s that the foundations for the assertions are lacking and therefore undiscussable.

Please, try to explain at least to yourself what is the connection between the Babel Tower and a working Neural Network.
I am afraid it is the effect of rolling pills also...

[jp]

I suggest the following game to train about that is not exactly chess because of different scoring rules and the fact that you have probability of 50% not to start from the opening position.

In every game you start from the opening position with probability of 50% and from random position from a big pgn with probability of 50%
You continue games until mate.
In case that you win the number of moves is important and the score is not 1 or 0.

I suggest a score of 0.5+0.5*(0.99^number of moves) for the side that wins the game so there is going to be a big difference between winning in 100 moves and winning in 200 moves and if lc0 continue trolling instead of trying to find the fastest mate it is going to lose matches inspite of having more wins than the opponent.

How would you select the random positions?

The main problem is getting the computer resources to do this training idea. Otherwise we could try lots of different forks.

[corres]

I wrote a classical chess engine, http://www.LanternChess.com/pulsar/ and now they tell me there are these other ones. My only thought is when am I going to have to support this in one of my apps and you guys wont be happy which stockfish anymore. They do sound pretty good with some of the results. And of course we've all seen the news of beating stockfish. But I understand they are larger things and don't fit on Android and iOS devices as much.
Now as to the assertions that don't have any foundations, so cant be discussed, well I think you can discuss them about as well as I have here and that is about it.

I do not know who was addressed by you.
In my opinion to write a chess program basically a hobby. And as every hobby gives some happiness to the writer if the engine works well - even if nobody use it beside of the author.
On this site the great majority of members are chess engine users and not chess engine writers.
They can not value the effort of the chess engine writers but the Elo value of those engines only.
An alone author with limited resources can not contend with a complete team of professional programmer like Stockfish, Komodo, Houdini (also), Leela, etc.
This is the sad reality.
Maybe you would be in connection to other chess programmer on the sub-site of "Programming and Technical Discussions", I think.