AlphaWhat?

[Eelco de Groot]

This usually happens around Christmas, Rodolfo. Don't pay too much attention. People with too much time not knowing how to spend it more wisely

[Eelco de Groot]

I think SF could have a better performance with better settings tough.

This is trivial to test, just play SF at 1min/move against SF at 1min/move with all the paraphernalia that it was missing, if the new one beats the old one by 30 elo, A0 would only have won by 70 elo intead of 100.

I think you're right. But I'm using my limited free time and old PC for correspondence chess. I could try something like that on next spring, IMO. It could be interesting.
Latest SF Dev + Cerebellum + Syzygy vs naked SF8, 1 min/move.

I think that is easily more than 100 Elo stronger than SF 8 by now, but maybe not when SF 8 has 64 cores at the hardware they were using. The Cerebellum and Syzygy are not really fair IMO, although a form of learning should be allowed because that is what they did too.

I'm not a mathematician you'd have to ask Tord and Joona but I prefer to think of Alpha Zero as Aleph-Null but that is just the German form of the mathematical term. Alpha Zero is more natural to English speakers. A form of infinity like ∞, where Google gets its name from. Aleph is used in the mathematical symbol, I suppose because Georg Cantor used that? Not sure.

Great find! Aleph-null would be a wonderful logo for A0. Thanks Eelco!

Thanks Michel! Now we just need the engine or whatever it is... I was serious though, I believe we are living in a myth that some people want to bring to life, and that the Golem would deserve a Biblical name

At the moment it does not seem that we will see many more games. More power to the myth...

[MikeGL]

I think SF could have a better performance with better settings tough.

This is trivial to test, just play SF at 1min/move against SF at 1min/move with all the paraphernalia that it was missing, if the new one beats the old one by 30 elo, A0 would only have won by 70 elo intead of 100.

I think you're right. But I'm using my limited free time and old PC for correspondence chess. I could try something like that on next spring, IMO. It could be interesting.
Latest SF Dev + Cerebellum + Syzygy vs naked SF8, 1 min/move.

I think that is easily more than 100 Elo stronger than SF 8 by now, but maybe not when SF 8 has 64 cores at the hardware they were using. The Cerebellum and Syzygy are not really fair IMO, although a form of learning should be allowed because that is what they did too.

I used "easily" too easily, I just want to correct that. Stefan Pohl's data suggest that the distance under his conditions, with his hardware, SF 8 to asmBrainfish is actually very close to 100 points,

Thanks to Stefan for the .jpg, I hope he does not mind that I reproduce it here!

Sorry for my ignorance, but this is a graph of Elo Rating versus what actually?
I mean it clearly shows y-axis as Elo rating, but what is x-axis depicting on this graph?

[syzygy]

I mean it clearly shows y-axis as Elo rating, but what is x-axis depicting on this graph?

The time: year/month.

[Werewolf]

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.

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.

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...

Well said Adam. I doubt we'll get a rematch, but there's a much stronger chess entity out there than the SF version Deep Mind used.

[MikeGL]

I mean it clearly shows y-axis as Elo rating, but what is x-axis depicting on this graph?

The time: year/month.

Oh I see, thanks.
Looks interesting, especially the one with Cerebellum loaded.

[Rodolfo Leoni]

This usually happens around Christmas, Rodolfo. Don't pay too much attention. People with too much time not knowing how to spend it more wisely

No problem, Eelco.
There are just people who can't understand the substance of that event. For someone, that paper became "The Holy Paper". I don't care about fanatism. Nothing is absolutely white or absolutely black.

It was a marketing event. Nothing wrong, because that marketing was about an amazing hardware and its first chess engine. But we still know so little about its potential and limits... The fact of having so many different opinions confirms it's the best hardware innovation ever. Let us see where it brings us...

[Ovyron]

If DeepMind had played the Matches at 2 min/move, we would have been looking at a Score of maybe 72-0 and not 28-0 in favor of AlphaZero !

You can't just say that without posting the full expected spectrum of results that you'd expect to see for any time control.

I did that up to +11 days per move. The expected result would be +32 =68 -0 at 2 min/move.

Or, what would be your expected result at 11 days/move? Alpha Zero at 7000 ELO?

[glennsamuel32]

In a few hours A0 was superior to an engine developed for many years by humans.

That's the point most people miss (or choose to ignore ?) and go on harping about TCs and Hardware and the like.
Also, the STYLE of play was simply amazing.
Stockfish has been beaten many times by Komodo/Houdini, nothing new, but the way Stockfish was outplayed was astonishing.
AlphaZero simply TOYED with Stockfish in some of those Games and Stockfish looked so clueless, it was almost SCARY !
It made you wonder "Is THIS (Stockfish) what so many brilliant Programmers have been working on for so many years ? If so, they might have better spent that time with their families or playing Tiddlywinks or something ?"
It certainly didn't look like a routine Engine-Engine Match.
And the way AlphaZero's detractors emphasize on the large number of Draws is simply ridiculous.
If they had even bothered to go through the DeepMind Paper, it would have been obvious from Figure 2 on Page 7 that strength of AlphaZero increases rapidly with more time given, even more so than Stockfish.
In a Rapid/Blitz Match which most Testers here use, Stockfish may even have achieved a Draw.
In fact the result vindicates my oft-stated conviction that even a million blitz games are no substitute for a few good LTC Matches, but that's another story.
If DeepMind had played the Matches at 2 min/move, we would have been looking at a Score of maybe 72-0 and not 28-0 in favor of AlphaZero !
But perhaps DeepMind was just being kind to the old Alpha-Beta Engine lovers.

This character is only trying to provoke, like the pitiful troll and fool that he is.
The main users of Rybka forum have ignored him (literally put him on Ignore, as their forum allows them)
His only motive is to aggravate people. Now that he knows the chess he "plays" isn't the best, he feels inadequate...LOL

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

I suggest a return match with SF being the home team.

Conditions:
- Alpha plays on 1 GPU
- a version of Alpha with no opening knowledge takes part
- TC using increment
- adapted SF plays on 2048 cores, but maybe 8192 is better
- huge HT for SF
- SF has the right of repeating the same winning opening line all over again

After the 100 game match, played at the SF premises(wherever that is, maybe somewhere on the Framework), SF team will declare the result and officially publish 10 games.

What do you think the result will be?