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There has been a rematch recently vs Stockfish, with a couple of hundred games. AlphaZero won 155-6! [0] There are fascinating videos with grandmasters commentating on some of the games. They're played in an exciting, sacrificial, swashbuckling style, nothing like any other top computer engine, and it seems that may affect the play of top (human) players for the better. e.g. see

Matthew Sadler on chess24

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JacRX6cKIaY&list=PLAwlxGCJB4...

Daniel King

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFtY7gNRVRI&index=3&list=PLh...

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero#Chess_2

⬐ thom

A lot of the moves most praised by GMs are seen as the only moves in the position by Stockfish 9/10. I think there's a huge amount of cognitive dissonance going on, so that people can label AlphaZero's play more 'human'.

Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if AlphaZero lines have existed at the top of the game for some time. Would be a no brainer for someone to have made Google an offer after the first paper.

⬐ yesenadam

I don't know what you mean by:

I think there's a huge amount of cognitive dissonance going on, so that people can label AlphaZero's play more 'human'.

or:

if AlphaZero lines have existed at the top of the game for some time.

⬐ thom

I think people are overly keen to imbue AlphaZero with characteristics they associate with human play. Stockfish plays lots of alien lines, often relying on perfect defense, that no human would probably attempt in a real game. It's painful and jarring to admit that perfect chess might make no sense to humans, even after the fact. So I think people have emotional reasons to want to call AZ's play more human-like and natural, because it redeems human chess intuition. And to an extent it's valid, AZ is strategically much more sound as you'd expect from it's brilliant evaluation of positions, but it is still powerful enough to play completely inscrutable lines and to accept positions that look plain ugly. And besides, Stockfish also plays some beautiful stuff and newer versions play many of the nice moves we're seeing praised in YouTube videos. Just my cod psychology take, not really a deep point, and not something I'd really argue strongly about.

The second point, I'm saying it's likely some teams, possibly Caruana's have had access to AlphaZero already, and if the public had better access to its analysis we might be able to look at more games from 2018 and see its insights pop up. Certainly some of the lines Caruana played at the World Championship match were strongly backed by AlphaZero in the videos released, but weren't Stockfish's choice, for example.

⬐ yesenadam

Thank you. :-)

⬐ mda

So if Alpha zero trashes Stockfish 10 will you be saying, Oh Stockfish 11 sees these as only positions.. Please.

⬐ thom

No, I will just be questioning the humans that label these moves as unique snowflakes that no other type of engine could conceive of.

⬐ mda

I watched almost all the games with commentaries, I agree with the commentators, the style is definitely unique and not seen before. If the engine could see these they would not get absolutely destroyed.

⬐ fairplay2

The Wikipedia link says this was against Stockfish 8. Could people please stop spreading FUD here?

If there's no public tournament, this might as well not have happened. I do not understand why Google is always special. Other engines are open, Google can test against Stockfish but not vice versa.

All these web companies take, take, take from Open Source and rarely give back.

I'll write a paper now that I beat Carlsen, but I'll refuse to do so in public.

⬐ thom

So, after the first match in which they played against an obviously crippled version of Stockfish, and published games that involved blundering full queens worth of material, I too was skeptical of the second paper. However the setup was entirely reasonable (they basically copied what had recently been used in a computer chess championship and it was plenty beefy) and no weird time controls were used.

You can still run the PGN of the published games back and find some places where Stockfish 8 will analyse its own moves and find them blunders, so it _would_ be good for all this to happen out in the open, but I don't think there's any large scale deception going on here. I think it's beyond reasonable doubt now that AlphaZero is easily as strong as they are claiming.

⬐ yesenadam

>Could people please stop spreading FUD here?

Do you mean me? If so, why not say so. "Could people please stop X-ing here?" is very passive-aggressive. I looked up 'FUD' - Fear, uncertainty and doubt. Not sure how what I said counts as any of those. Your comment certainly seems to want to spread FUD, however. (And why is this your account's only comment on HN?)

I don't know the significance of your first sentence either. I know nothing about the versions of Stockfish used for this or anything else. Maybe you're taking too much for granted. i.e. that I know enough of the minutiae to understand your comments. Could you fill in the dots a bit? And who are 'all these web companies'?

I'm not super-interested in AlphaZero (or computer chess generally) - haven't read any of the papers, for example. But there's a lot of talk about the various Alphas in the online chess world, since before it was playing chess, and I found these videos very impressive. And it's ridiculous to say "This might as well not have happened". Maybe true for you, but not for the chess world, at all.

Daniel King is doing them now (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFtY7gNRVRI), and so is Matthew Sadler for Chess24 (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAwlxGCJB4NchyTBYik8F...).

⬐ pie_hacker

I think it should be noted that Stockfish and AlphaZero were running on vastly different hardware during this match. I wonder which engine would win in a more typical fair match (in my opinion, the match they ran was unfair). It's a shame that AlphaZero is proprietary, and as such, there is no way to find out.

If you want to see a chess grandmaster go through one of the games, Daniel King is always excellent: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFtY7gNRVRI