shrapnel wrote:
Forget about ELO calculations for a moment, did you see the QUALITY of the games ? I didn't expect such a Post from you. Anyway, you've made Milos and Tsvetkov very happy.
A stronger Stockfish wouldn't have changed anything because its problems are at the core of its approach, the whole point was to show how it thought itself to be so strong, and it's not like Stockfish played in a Pentium 4 with 1MB RAM.
Spot on !
My quibble with Elo is just my curiosity about Tord's what appeared to me to be nitpicking at handicaps SF suffered. Well, it is not that groundless. First, out of curiosity, I measured the effect of hash size at 50x overload (compared to 40% optimal load), and it came about twice as large as I expected. Also, Vincent seems to be right, with more threads and Lazy SMP, it is even more severe. For seven threads I got 56 Elo points handicap, but in only 200 games.
Also, with a book like Cerebellum maybe SF would have rarely entered losing positions in the middlegames, although Cerebellum is not an anti-A0 book. Moreover time control management IS important, but DeepMind could have easily implemented it for A0 even better.
Positionally, A0 no doubt is incomparably better than SF or anything. Even Giraffe eval was derived to be comparable to SF eval, only an order or two of magnitudes slower. But there are things to ponder about. AFAIK MCTS is prone to fall for deep tactical traps (at least in Go that was my experience, not as a player, as an observer). Are you sure that A0 is better than Houdini Tactical on Arasan 19 Tactical Testsuite (say on same hardware used in matches)? That those positions almost never occur in games is less relevant for the question.
Another my quibble is that DeepMind is not caring about me as a potential user of their software adapted for a regular i7 with a strong GPU. And it would be nice if they cared, because building this software requires enormous hardware resources only they have access to. Although in Go they have achieved incredible level of play (1000+ Elo points beyond anything human), the best we have as of now is Zen 7 based on AlphaGo project, but developed with very limited resources. From what I analyzed it is not yet Lee Sedol or Ke Jie level on my PC, probably only strong pro-level. In Chess, probably we will have to wait several years until A0 approach adopted by some developers with limited resources will reach some top engine strength for ordinary users.
A0 is surely revolutionary, for example it reinvented the opening theory from scratch, and I am itching to have access to A0 to check some databases of human opening theory. But they will publish a paper in "Nature" and move on.