What do you understand? The chess expert with no chess merits giving chess engine advice but don't have a clue about software development. You are the laughing stock my dear Tsvetkov.Lyudmil Tsvetkov wrote:They have showed nothing.Tobber wrote:I think you are blinded by your interest in chess. Deepmind/Google has in my opinion no interest at all in chess. They used SF, and similar for Shogi and Go, to prove that their methods work.APassionForCriminalJustic wrote:You need to remember that the conditions were not at all favorable to Stockfish. This is not about being negative. It's a fact. Stockfish only had one minute to move. That in and of itself is certainly going to make it weaker. Then you can talk about the hash file size. But to me AlphaZero clearly had a hardware advantage running on 4 TPUs. Yes - I am sure that this point has been made multiple times but people seem to agree that those 4 TPUs are many, many times more powerful versus Stockfish's 64-core rig. Team Google should have had more balls. They should have made Stockfish as absolutely as strong as possible. That way - you cover all of your tracks and ultimately diffuse the inevitable skepticism.shrapnel wrote:People get so involved in discussions about ELO, TBs and TimeControls and other technicalities, they forget the basics of chess.
If you just go through the Games as a chess player, its completely obvious that Stockfish was completely out-classed and simply didn't have a clue about what was going on.
It is obvious to any average chess player that AlphaZero was playing at a completely different level and was seeing the Chessboard as a whole in a completely different way than Stockfish.
You can grumble about the version of SF used, TC used and anything else, but in my humble opinion, AlphaZero was so completely superior to Stockfish, that it wouldn't have made any significant difference to the outcome.
Its the Dawn of a New Age in computer chess, whether the nay sayers agree or not.
Of course, unfortunately since DeepMind isn't showing much interest in chess, the voices of these negative people will only grow stronger.
Soon they will claim that there was nothing like AlphaZero and it was all a big hoax.
But the people who really understand what Chess is about, have seen what actually happened on the ChessBoard and know the Truth.
Despite all of this Stockfish still had nearly 80 draws. That is far from your claimed whole new different play of chess. Maybe AlphaZero is the future of computer chess. But not anytime soon... good luck affording the particular hardware used... plus AlphaZero is not really that impressive when you do consider its massive state-of-the-art hardware. Don't be blind...
They used an official download for SF and no development version, make sense to me.
Trained A0 until it was stronger and then showed the world what they can do. Don't you see the whole point? In a few hours A0 was superior to an engine developed for many years by humans. Against a stronger chess engine they had just enhanced the training of A0.
And 1 minute per move, so what? Of course SF would be stronger with another time setting but so would A0, they took the decision and played games with that settings, same for both engines right? Why is it unfair with the same setting for both engines?
Opening books? A0 did beat SF when using an opening book, not a very advanced opening book but similar to what we saw in TCEC. 50 games as white and 50 as black, what is unfair with that?
Last point the hardware difference. The complaints here are nonsense, they have showed that their combination of hardware and neural networks are better than traditional software development on traditional hardware. (Before you come shouting about other software I should add for some types of software). There's no interest in being "fair", they are interested in the commercial potential with their combination of hardware and NN and chess engines are totally uninteresting in this respect.
/John
They made laughing stocks of themselves, comparing watermelons to blackberries.
/John