Evert wrote:They don't give a rat's ass about what "the chess programming community" thinks, they're not trying to build the best and greatest chess playing program. They're trying to build a general AI that can learn to solve complex puzzles (in this case, play games) by re-inforced learning.
Exactly! All this talk about faking games and hiding stuff to impress us is nonsense, they don't even read this or another chess forum and they didn't really care for opening books or endgame tablebases.
The crux of the issue is that the development of Stockfish took several years in the making, and it's a state of the art engine that uses a recollection of the best classical methods of computing for chess and any other board game of its kind.
Stockfish was a great choice because it's open source, very strong, and pretty much every old idea is implemented in it, and either kept and optimized for a chess program, or ditched because it didn't work.
They came with their idea, and replicated that in 4 hours of training.
The result doesn't really matter, and even if their approach just scored 49-51 in favor of Stockfish, the achievement would have been as remarkable.