IQ wrote: ↑Fri Aug 03, 2018 12:44 pm
you probaly will not want to answer this, which i can perfectly understand, but how do you view the situation personally?
1) Pretending LC0 with a different network is a new engine is, to say the least, disingenuous. I haven't watched the interview yet but the statements made on the TCEC website were at the very least highly misleading. This has now been clarified. Alexander gave a rather frank statement about how he feels about what happened. I don't see what I can add here.
2) Training a supervised network to get "good" performance in chess is not trivial (depending on some definition of "good" of course). It took some attempts during early Leela Zero Chess development to get one that was good enough to be sure the engine was working before launching the distributed effort, and at least one person kept insisting it was impossible
. It's also much less complicated than writing the entire engine.
The discussion whether what Albert did was "hard" can be compared someone submitting an Elo-gaining patch to Stockfish, for example, or any of the improved clones of open source engines, etc. (Well, we don't know if Albert's network is actually stronger than the main net to begin with, but ignore that for the sake of this discussion...)
It is not at all easy to find an Elo gainer for Stockfish, and nobody should pretend they can just go out and do that themselves. It's still much less hard than writing an equally strong engine from scratch. Nobody who finds an Elo gainer for Stockfish should go and rename the engine and claim it as his own.
3) The real problem, IMHO, is with
TCEC and other engine authors. Why is Leela allowed to enter twice, with only a different parametrization, and other engines are not allowed to do the same? This is, at the base, grossly unfair. More entries means a higher chance to win, that is basic statistics. TCEC walks a fine line between "tournament of someone's basement" and "de-facto world championship for engines". In my opinion, allowing both Deus X and Leela Zero Chess in the same tournament moves TCEC more towards the former status than the latter.