I can't believe that so many people don't get it!

[pilgrimdan]

All of the document can be true, except that a paragraph of how AZ learned SF8 first was left out.

That would make them die-hard liars. Lying by omission is still lying. It would be considered gross scientific fraud.

Yep.

If I remember correctly you are doing this stuff even longer than me and I would say this AZ thing (provided the conditions of the match meet the scientific standard) by far is the biggest breakthrough in computer chess ever. Would you not agree with me? And the paper doesn't meet the scientific standard. Hence I prefer (as announced in CTF) to stick to my DA role for the moment, discuss every detail, until everything is said, people might see that as strange but I feel it as an obligation.

The paper then. Reading it I would say the author(s) have a good understanding of computer chess in general, excellent understanding of the inner works of a chess program, some members of the deepmind team are (maybe even long time) members and lurk here because it is likely they know this is the place where the programmers meet and where their document will be scrutinized and yet I have to believe they don't know how to properly play a fair match? Is that stupidity? If not stupidity then what is it?

There are indeed reasons to believe (we discussed it) all 100 games were played from the start position, how stupid is that? And if not stupidity then what is it? Did they not know you either play from predefined opening lines or from an opening book? If only it were to avoid doubles. They did not know?

Did they not know by doing so they favored AZ?

From the paper we read AZ learned the most common openings and left SF in the dark, not allowing an opening book. They did not know that is unfair?

Of course they knew.

And yet they decided as they decided.

Why?

I consider the "why" question as one of the most important question in life. Everything happens for a reason.

~~~~~

I proposed a working model, learning an opponent from the start position, we even have a proven case (Mchess 5) from the past during the RGCC 96/97 period.

Not showing us all 100 games, the fixed 1 minute TC all fit well in this picture.

Adding up all things I am a sceptic for good reasons.

I was told that at the Free University (or was it UvA) only two thesis defenses in all of the history of the university had not resulted in granting the Ph.D. degree. In one of them the student appeared stone drunk. The other was for a thesis that discussed an experimental treatment of a certain kind of cancer, which by the 10 case studies treated in the thesis looked very good. And then during questioning, it turned out that the fact that 90 other patients submitted to this same treatment had died had been omitted...

Terrible indeed.

hi Ed...

it may well be like you said they perfectly knew...

one thought...

this may have been the 'optimal conditions' so that alphazero would not lose one single game...

and still make it look plausible...

and as far as the chess programming community...

their 'not having one single loss' no matter how 'odd' the conditions...

is what their only conern was...

if it isolated the computer chess community...

then so be it...

pretty ruthless and cut-throat...

but, obviously they didn't care...

only that alphzero did not have any losses...

and the 'setup' they used did the trick...

[Rodolfo Leoni]

...........................................................................
What are the expected gains if a top AB searcher like SF adopted similar learning?
...........................................................................

Hi Mike,

That above can be done without modify SF. Maybe that wouldn't be easy, but possible with a dedicated GUI. Of course that would different from hashing trees as it happens with Romi. GUI could only handle a learning book, but what's matter? When an engine uses learning it sends an output and it waits for an input. If it comes from hash or from a file, it's the same. (So the discussion about book learning or hash learning isn't relevant, as all learning engines use a file for storing positions and hashing them.)

To make SF learning by self-play, it'd suffice to set a "book contempt". That would avoid to repeat auto selfplay of a draw game

That of course is not Romi's behavior, but it would give you a learning SF effect. Hardware limits remain, tough. Our pockets are too empty for buying a 5000 TPUs hardware!

As I said in the quote above, it's possible to make Romi learning working with SF, K, or any engine one wants. Just read above....

To do something is different than to talk about it.

[corres]

[quote="Michael Sherwin"]

Stockfish with reinforcement learning, no doubt improved over Romi's, if fully trained would be about 5,000 elo assuming the elo ceiling is indeed higher significantly. The truth despite, "The higher flexibility of neural network is doubtless", Alpha Zero is no where near as strong as SF with such learning.

[/quote]

I am afraid Stockfish or any other common chess engines never reach 5000 Elo with or without learning process of Romi but AlphaZero can do it.
Neural network of AlphaZero stores such a complex information about the learned positions what information can not contained by a simple value of "score" used by all common engines.
Please, read the post of Mr.Zipproth about his experience and my reaction to it.
Moreover the simulated games played by AlphaZero based on MCTS enhance the effectiveness and reliability of information stored in neural network of AlphaZero.

[Rebel]

All of the document can be true, except that a paragraph of how AZ learned SF8 first was left out.

That would make them die-hard liars. Lying by omission is still lying. It would be considered gross scientific fraud.

Yep.

If I remember correctly you are doing this stuff even longer than me and I would say this AZ thing (provided the conditions of the match meet the scientific standard) by far is the biggest breakthrough in computer chess ever. Would you not agree with me? And the paper doesn't meet the scientific standard. Hence I prefer (as announced in CTF) to stick to my DA role for the moment, discuss every detail, until everything is said, people might see that as strange but I feel it as an obligation.

The paper then. Reading it I would say the author(s) have a good understanding of computer chess in general, excellent understanding of the inner works of a chess program, some members of the deepmind team are (maybe even long time) members and lurk here because it is likely they know this is the place where the programmers meet and where their document will be scrutinized and yet I have to believe they don't know how to properly play a fair match? Is that stupidity? If not stupidity then what is it?

There are indeed reasons to believe (we discussed it) all 100 games were played from the start position, how stupid is that? And if not stupidity then what is it? Did they not know you either play from predefined opening lines or from an opening book? If only it were to avoid doubles. They did not know?

Did they not know by doing so they favored AZ?

From the paper we read AZ learned the most common openings and left SF in the dark, not allowing an opening book. They did not know that is unfair?

Of course they knew.

And yet they decided as they decided.

Why?

I consider the "why" question as one of the most important question in life. Everything happens for a reason.

~~~~~

I proposed a working model, learning an opponent from the start position, we even have a proven case (Mchess 5) from the past during the RGCC 96/97 period.

Not showing us all 100 games, the fixed 1 minute TC all fit well in this picture.

Adding up all things I am a sceptic for good reasons.

I was told that at the Free University (or was it UvA) only two thesis defenses in all of the history of the university had not resulted in granting the Ph.D. degree. In one of them the student appeared stone drunk. The other was for a thesis that discussed an experimental treatment of a certain kind of cancer, which by the 10 case studies treated in the thesis looked very good. And then during questioning, it turned out that the fact that 90 other patients submitted to this same treatment had died had been omitted...

Terrible indeed.

hi Ed...

it may well be like you said they perfectly knew...

one thought...

this may have been the 'optimal conditions' so that alphazero would not lose one single game...

and still make it look plausible...

and as far as the chess programming community...

their 'not having one single loss' no matter how 'odd' the conditions...

is what their only conern was...

if it isolated the computer chess community...

then so be it...

pretty ruthless and cut-throat...

but, obviously they didn't care...

only that alphzero did not have any losses...

and the 'setup' they used did the trick...

Well, maybe the paper is meant as a pilot balloon to measure the criticism before they make it official on the deepmind page. AlphaGo is up. The wait is for AlphaZero.

Something else I forgot, the hardware, from the paper:

Code: Select all

AlphaZero NPS 80,000 
Stockfish NPS 70,000,000

For the casual reader they make it appear SF had a giant advantage, but they don't mention the hardware advantage of the TPU's over the SF hardware. It's hard to really know the advantage factor, I read numbers varying from 50-100 to 1000. It's another unscientific way to present facts.

[CheckersGuy]

They dont make SF appear stronger at all. It's just you and some other ppl thinking that they did. It`s just a fact that AlphaGo looked at much fewer nodes than SF. If one actually read the paper it should be clear that AlphaZero had better hardware (at least for the training part).

Additionally, this paper is just a preprint. It does not need to contain all the information as long as the actually paper does contain that information which is missing.
Seeing that almost every 2nd post is about DeepMind not providing enough infromation is really really stupid and the only reason why we have such posts is that ppl are too lazy to read...

[hgm]

If I remember correctly you are doing this stuff even longer than me and I would say this AZ thing (provided the conditions of the match meet the scientific standard) by far is the biggest breakthrough in computer chess ever. Would you not agree with me?

I agree it is pretty big. But the fact that before they did the same thing for Go somewhat eclipses it. It is well kown that Chess is just a trivial game compared to Go. So the large majority of mankind that do not happen to be Chess players will just shrug about it, as much as you would when someone came to you with a Tic Tac Toe program, being very excited that it it leared all by itself to become unbeatable. "Computer that could master a difficult game can now also masters a simple game"... So what?

And the paper doesn't meet the scientific standard.

Well, I used to be a scientist in my professional carreer, ad I do't think there is much wrong with it. If I had been asked to referee this paper, I would just have required one change: that they cannot say "TCEC world champion", and should drop the "world".

Hence I prefer (as announced in CTF) to stick to my DA role for the moment, discuss every detail, until everything is said, people might see that as strange but I feel it as an obligation.

Nothing wrong with being DA. (Reminds me of a movie with a brilliant Al Pacino, BTW.)

There are indeed reasons to believe (we discussed it) all 100 games were played from the start position, how stupid is that?

Aren't Chess games by definition not always starting from that position? If Carlsen plays Anand for the world title, don't all the games start from that position? I don't think it would officially qualify as 'Chess' when you start from another position. That would be one strong reason to do it.

Starting from know opening lines would weaken their claim that the computer played only from knowledge it learned itself. People could say: "but you started from selected good positions, which the program might not have been able to find by itself. You made it develop his pieces, and left alone it migh just have been shuttling its Rook between a1 and a2". That would also be a good reason to start all games from the official opening position.

BTW, they also started games from 12 other positions, but attach less significance to the fact that they also beat Stockfish there.

And if not stupidity then what is it? Did they not know you either play from predefined opening lines or from an opening book? If only it were to avoid doubles. They did not know?

Well, for one, I do often play matches starting from the same position. If the engines randomize enough, there is nothing against that. Problems with duplicats and games that only diverge after being decided do not occur in that case.

So it seems indeed a legitimate questions whether there was enough game diversity in 100 games. This is a reason to request publication of all the 100 games, (which most scientific journals would not like at all; they are not Chess magazins...), or at least adding some text to address the point, like revealing the longest line they had in common. Something like: "All games had diverged after 15 moves, and on average the number of initial moves shared between games was 6". That would satisfy me. If they would say instead 80 and 45, there obviously is a problem, close to fraud.

Did they not know by doing so they favored AZ?

Of course they did not know that, because it is not true, and they are not stupid... Both were playing without book, so there was no bias.

From the paper we read AZ learned the most common openings and left SF in the dark, not allowing an opening book. They did not know that is unfair?

AZ played the openings from its general Chess knowledge. Common openings are common because they consist of good moves. If Stockfish was any good, it would also prefer common openings. If not... well, perhaps Stockfish isn't so strong as people want to make it out to be. Perhaps winning TCEC doesn't mean as much as people think, so that beatig the TCEC winner fair and square doesn't mean a thing, because TCEC is typically won by programs that utterly suck at Chess...

[mjlef]

Although AlphaZero's neural network could indeed learn specific opening moves, it does a lot more. The neural network is used to do thee two things:

a. predict the probability that a move will be played (actually, the position after the move is made)
b. predict the probability of a specific position is a win.loss/draw

These outputs are used to guide the search.

What you describe is a scheme to learn better openings. But you have no mentioned if your scheme helps for the entire game. Based on your description, it does not seem to effect either the evaluation or the search once it reaches positions not in the previous games. AlphaZero is a generalized neural network which outputs the above information even for positions it has never seen.

[Michael Sherwin]

Although AlphaZero's neural network could indeed learn specific opening moves, it does a lot more. The neural network is used to do thee two things:

a. predict the probability that a move will be played (actually, the position after the move is made)
b. predict the probability of a specific position is a win.loss/draw

These outputs are used to guide the search.

What you describe is a scheme to learn better openings. But you have no mentioned if your scheme helps for the entire game. Based on your description, it does not seem to effect either the evaluation or the search once it reaches positions not in the previous games. AlphaZero is a generalized neural network which outputs the above information even for positions it has never seen.

1. Experiential data with a reinforcement scheme is brought into the hash file.
2. The search produces statistical information that modifies the pst's of the evaluator
3. The modified evaluator then affects the search which affects the evaluator.
4. This last long after the experiential data has run out.
5. There is a lasting generalized effect that is not static but can morph as the needs of the position changes.

It is very crude but it works.

[Frank Brenner]

If you're right, it would mean that AlphaZero would lose every match so badly if the starting position is one that AlphaZero has never played before in practice.

I think that's very unlikely that you are right.
It sounds more like a conspiracy theory.

Just as well Google could have created the 100 chess games synthetically without AlphaZero even existed.

AlphaGO (GO) also played against people who played completely independent. AlphaGo was thus able to generalize the knowledge gained from hours of work.

There is no reason to believe that AlphaZero should not be able to do this in chess games.

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

All of the document can be true, except that a paragraph of how AZ learned SF8 first was left out.

That would make them die-hard liars. Lying by omission is still lying. It would be considered gross scientific fraud.

Yep.

If I remember correctly you are doing this stuff even longer than me and I would say this AZ thing (provided the conditions of the match meet the scientific standard) by far is the biggest breakthrough in computer chess ever. Would you not agree with me? And the paper doesn't meet the scientific standard. Hence I prefer (as announced in CTF) to stick to my DA role for the moment, discuss every detail, until everything is said, people might see that as strange but I feel it as an obligation.

The paper then. Reading it I would say the author(s) have a good understanding of computer chess in general, excellent understanding of the inner works of a chess program, some members of the deepmind team are (maybe even long time) members and lurk here because it is likely they know this is the place where the programmers meet and where their document will be scrutinized and yet I have to believe they don't know how to properly play a fair match? Is that stupidity? If not stupidity then what is it?

There are indeed reasons to believe (we discussed it) all 100 games were played from the start position, how stupid is that? And if not stupidity then what is it? Did they not know you either play from predefined opening lines or from an opening book? If only it were to avoid doubles. They did not know?

Did they not know by doing so they favored AZ?

From the paper we read AZ learned the most common openings and left SF in the dark, not allowing an opening book. They did not know that is unfair?

Of course they knew.

And yet they decided as they decided.

Why?

I consider the "why" question as one of the most important question in life. Everything happens for a reason.

~~~~~

I proposed a working model, learning an opponent from the start position, we even have a proven case (Mchess 5) from the past during the RGCC 96/97 period.

Not showing us all 100 games, the fixed 1 minute TC all fit well in this picture.

Adding up all things I am a sceptic for good reasons.

I was told that at the Free University (or was it UvA) only two thesis defenses in all of the history of the university had not resulted in granting the Ph.D. degree. In one of them the student appeared stone drunk. The other was for a thesis that discussed an experimental treatment of a certain kind of cancer, which by the 10 case studies treated in the thesis looked very good. And then during questioning, it turned out that the fact that 90 other patients submitted to this same treatment had died had been omitted...

Terrible indeed.

hi Ed...

it may well be like you said they perfectly knew...

one thought...

this may have been the 'optimal conditions' so that alphazero would not lose one single game...

and still make it look plausible...

and as far as the chess programming community...

their 'not having one single loss' no matter how 'odd' the conditions...

is what their only conern was...

if it isolated the computer chess community...

then so be it...

pretty ruthless and cut-throat...

but, obviously they didn't care...

only that alphzero did not have any losses...

and the 'setup' they used did the trick...

Anyone having computed the probability that a 100 elo stronger engine will not lose a single game against its opponent?
Is the +28 =72 score theoretically possible at all, when matching 2 engines 100 elo apart?

If not, what?