Very disappointing. I was hoping, after some of the previous posts you'd made, that you might have an actual point, but it seems my initial assessment was correct after all: you don't have an overall point, and you're just floundering around looking for excuses to deny that AlphaZero defeated Stockfish +28 =72 -0 in a 100-game match.noobpwnftw wrote:You are contradicting yourself, I had my opinion(as one of the general public and not a part of the almighty shareholders) but what's wrong if it does not favor the A0 side?David Xu wrote:I refer you to the title of this thread. "So Alpha Zero was a hoax?" sounds pretty conspiracy theory-esque to me. If this is not your view, then I apologize for lumping you in with everyone else, but frankly, if you don't want the label "conspiracy theorist", you're going to need to explain why you called AlphaZero an "attention-seeking attempt" in the LCZero thread earlier.
If you don't understand my point then I will try to rephrase it all together here instead of you quoting lines here and there without context.
The A0 introduces an approach to use generalized algorithms to play many different games(truth), particularly in chess they released some information that the training worked(truth) and claim that it performed better than SF(inconclusive, doubtful and unscientific) in a 100-game match(truth).
Stating those facts does not equal to being scientific.David Xu wrote:I fail to see what is unscientific about the preprint. They described the architecture of the network itself, they described the training procedure, and they described the results against a specific setup for Stockfish--results which are in principle replicable by a third party, given the information they provided. That's what it takes for a result to be "scientific". More varied experiments would have been nice, certainly, but that fact hardly invalidates the results of the experiment they did perform.
I can state the fact based on the 10 games that was published and conditions given, it is obvious and convincing that A0 would have a 100% win rate over SF, does it sound scientific to you?
There is a reason why we run those tournament matches instead of playing one on each side and decide the winner, why would this sound irrational to you when it comes to DM should've played more games especially on a short time control and have more variety to be scientific?
If it is so true then why the easy part(as I described above) is not done so to avoid these doubts is unknown to me. I would think of them as if they'd built a boat but sailing in a pool.David Xu wrote:what is so unbelievable to you about this result that you would sooner postulate deception on the part of Google DeepMind than take them at their word?
What is so different from people are constantly improving alpha-beta search by implementing things like PVS, MTF-d and refining search bounds in many different ways? Does your term "decades-old" include all these too?David Xu wrote:Monte-Carlo tree search is certainly a well-known technique that has existed for years, but the technique of using it as a policy improvement operator is, as far as I'm aware, a novel one. This technique, of course, the critical aspect of DeepMind's approach, since it's what allowed them to generate such high-quality training data.
This aspect is particularly more important for playing games like Chess as opposed to playing Go, where you are more likely to make one blunder move that would cost you the entire game. There is less tolerance of a wrong "likehood" estimation that a NN would normally give, so this results in less numbers of samples we can gather and correlate and more issues with overfitting.David Xu wrote: What I am saying is that the issue of overfitting is well-known, so bringing it up as a specific argument against neural networks in chess is not a particularly strong objection.
I have my reasons to support my opinion than calling something I don't agree "disingenuous".
Let us be clear: at no point did DeepMind claim that AlphaZero "performed better than Stockfish". That is a vague, meaningless claim that you hallucinated them making, presumably because in your mind any claim of a positive result against Stockfish automatically translates into a claim of superiority over Stockfish. What DeepMind claimed is that AlphaZero achieved a positive score--specifically a score of 64%--against a very specific Stockfish version with a very specific setup. That is the extent of their claims, and it suffices to demonstrate what they sought to demonstrate: that a reinforcement learning-based approach is capable of competing with the traditional alpha-beta approach. Anything else is mere interpretation on your part.
Your claim that chess is somehow different from Go, likewise, would have been much more convincing had it been made before the AlphaZero results were published--though even then it would have reeked of special pleading. (Did you know that Go also has long tactical sequences, of which a single inaccuracy can cost a player the game? Chess is not unique in this regard.) As it is, however, you are claiming that a specific task is unlikely to be possible after that task has already been accomplished--which makes your claim nothing short of ridiculous.
You claim not to be a "conspiracy theorist", but the only possible way to make sense of your statements as a whole is if we assume that you believe DeepMind outright lied about their achievement against Stockfish. Only then could you get away with claiming that neural networks cannot perform in chess, and only then could you make the assertion that DeepMind's behavior was "unscientific". This, however, would mark you as a conspiracy theorist of the deepest kind, regardless of whether you accept that label. The alternative is that you have simply been saying contradictory nonsense.
Conspiracy theories or illogical nonsense--neither of these interest me as a potential source of discussion, unfortunately, so I'm afraid I'll have to withdraw for now.
