TalkChess.com

Rodolfo Leoni wrote:

Albert Silver wrote:

Rodolfo Leoni wrote: and we know LTCs work as an equalizer.

We do? Why would we know any such thing?

A weaker engine has more chances to find the right move with LTC. But I'm not starting a poll about it, so everybody can disagree if he wants.

Lyudmil Tsvetkov wrote: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?

Lyudmil Tsvetkov wrote: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?

Rodolfo Leoni wrote:

syzygy wrote:......................................................
Note that I am not contesting that AlphaZero improves more than Stockfish with more time. At least the AlphaZero paper suggests that it does. (My explanation for AlphaZero profiting more from having more time is that it needs that time to correct for the inevitable tactical deficiencies of its NN-based evaluation.)

If you're right, we could then presume AlphaZero would heavily lose with blitz TCs.

And there's another doubt: what if AlphaZero played without that 4 hours self-training session?

We'll never know, IMO...

Tobber wrote:

APassionForCriminalJustic wrote:

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.

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...

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.

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

Lyudmil Tsvetkov wrote:

Rodolfo Leoni wrote:

syzygy wrote:......................................................
Note that I am not contesting that AlphaZero improves more than Stockfish with more time. At least the AlphaZero paper suggests that it does. (My explanation for AlphaZero profiting more from having more time is that it needs that time to correct for the inevitable tactical deficiencies of its NN-based evaluation.)

If you're right, we could then presume AlphaZero would heavily lose with blitz TCs.

And there's another doubt: what if AlphaZero played without that 4 hours self-training session?

We'll never know, IMO...

25 days after the glorious event, so precisely 4*150 hours later, when Alpha should obviously be over 15-20 000 elos, STILL not a word from Google about this historic achievement...

Any guess what could have gone wrong?

shrapnel wrote:

Tobber wrote: 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.

Lyudmil Tsvetkov wrote:

Rodolfo Leoni wrote:

syzygy wrote:......................................................
Note that I am not contesting that AlphaZero improves more than Stockfish with more time. At least the AlphaZero paper suggests that it does. (My explanation for AlphaZero profiting more from having more time is that it needs that time to correct for the inevitable tactical deficiencies of its NN-based evaluation.)

If you're right, we could then presume AlphaZero would heavily lose with blitz TCs.

And there's another doubt: what if AlphaZero played without that 4 hours self-training session?

We'll never know, IMO...

25 days after the glorious event, so precisely 4*150 hours later, when Alpha should obviously be over 15-20 000 elos, STILL not a word from Google about this historic achievement...

Any guess what could have gone wrong?

pilgrimdan wrote:

shrapnel wrote:

Tobber wrote: 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.

Anil

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Rodolfo Leoni wrote:

Eelco de Groot wrote: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...