128 CPU Stockfish Cluster Comments.

[Leo]

This +130 gives nice 3700 ELO! Maybe the upper limit for chess?

If you ad a book like Brainfish or Rebelfish or something similar the Elo keeps getting bigger. Hardware will keep getting better. If Lzero keeps improving that will work too. I think Elo will keep growing indefinitely. Way past 3700.

[Werewolf]

This +130 gives nice 3700 ELO! Maybe the upper limit for chess?

If you ad a book like Brainfish or Rebelfish or something similar the Elo keeps getting bigger. Hardware will keep getting better. If Lzero keeps improving that will work too. I think Elo will keep growing indefinitely.

Of course it won't.

For exactly the same reason that the elo of a simpler game (naughts and crosses, connect 4, draughts / checkers etc) doesn't go up forever. As soon as we get anywhere near perfect chess the best engines won't lose anymore and the elo of everyone will be capped.

[jefk]

werewolf, that's my hunch as well.
If properly calculated, the engines will not go much beyond 4000 i suspect;
actually we could make graph, and see/estimate where it might end.
(there are some of such graphs, but just from memory i did not see
yet a clear asympotical end level; yet 5000 seems too high imho)

[Uri Blass]

This +130 gives nice 3700 ELO! Maybe the upper limit for chess?

I doubt it, but possibly an upper limit for shared hash table alpha-beta.
On the other hand, the evaluation of LC0 is clearly vastly superior to the evaluation of Stockfish (due to less than 0.1% as many nodes during search giving an answer that is about equal in quality).
So suppose that the evaluation of Stockfish were tuned to equal the evaluation of LC0.
Perhaps the limit is 5000 Elo.

No, I doubt any entity will get over 4000 elo. I think we'll start to see the draw rate dramatically rise as this level of play is reached. But I'd love to be proved wrong.

I think that we need the concept of anti-engine to increase elo more than we can do only by using faster hardware in a normal way.
The idea is that we can use significantly faster hardware to prepare against specific opponents when we know also their weaker hardware.

The anti-stockfish engine may find by using stockfish that
after 22.Rad1 stockfish is going to make a losing blunder when
after 22.Rac1 stockfish is not going to make a losing blunder.

In theory both 22.Rad1 and 22.Rac1 are drawing moves against perfect play so better hardware with no anti-stockfish algorithm may choose 22.Rac1 and only get a draw.

[Leo]

This +130 gives nice 3700 ELO! Maybe the upper limit for chess?

If you ad a book like Brainfish or Rebelfish or something similar the Elo keeps getting bigger. Hardware will keep getting better. If Lzero keeps improving that will work too. I think Elo will keep growing indefinitely.

Of course it won't.

For exactly the same reason that the elo of a simpler game (naughts and crosses, connect 4, draughts / checkers etc) doesn't go up forever. As soon as we get anywhere near perfect chess the best engines won't lose anymore and the elo of everyone will be capped.

We are not anywhere near perfect chess. Elo will continue to go up for years.

[Uri Blass]

This +130 gives nice 3700 ELO! Maybe the upper limit for chess?

If you ad a book like Brainfish or Rebelfish or something similar the Elo keeps getting bigger. Hardware will keep getting better. If Lzero keeps improving that will work too. I think Elo will keep growing indefinitely.

Of course it won't.

For exactly the same reason that the elo of a simpler game (naughts and crosses, connect 4, draughts / checkers etc) doesn't go up forever. As soon as we get anywhere near perfect chess the best engines won't lose anymore and the elo of everyone will be capped.

We are not anywhere near perfect chess. Elo will continue to go up for years.

How do you know?
It is clear that we are getting closer to perfect chess and you cannot know if at LTC there are 400 elo more to get or 1000 elo more to get.

[Leo]

This +130 gives nice 3700 ELO! Maybe the upper limit for chess?

If you ad a book like Brainfish or Rebelfish or something similar the Elo keeps getting bigger. Hardware will keep getting better. If Lzero keeps improving that will work too. I think Elo will keep growing indefinitely.

Of course it won't.

For exactly the same reason that the elo of a simpler game (naughts and crosses, connect 4, draughts / checkers etc) doesn't go up forever. As soon as we get anywhere near perfect chess the best engines won't lose anymore and the elo of everyone will be capped.

We are not anywhere near perfect chess. Elo will continue to go up for years.

How do you know?
It is clear that we are getting closer to perfect chess and you cannot know if at LTC there are 400 elo more to get or 1000 elo more to get.

It is not clear to me at all. When you get even a 15 man table base then I will rethink it.

[Werewolf]

If some billionaire was willing to waste all his money on dedicated Stockfish 10 ASICs.
Then the cluster could easily be blown away.

4 billion nps is still very impressive though.

That billionaire would learn the lesson of Hydra.
A dump truck full of money will make an engine that will win for 4 years.
Ten years later, a commodity PC will give it a spanking.

I had the pleasure of testing Hydra and I think it was a worthwhile project. It gave us a glimpse of the future by showing us how strong chess machines could become. We also had a demolition of Mickey Adams which I enjoyed watching, sat only 10 feet away from him.

Finally, although it's true Hydra wasn't no.1 four years later, it was the strongest tactically (my own interest at the time was tactical test suites, I had one called "New Moon" and Chrilly let me try it out on the machine) for about 6 years. It was only when the Rybka Cluster came along that I felt Hydra had been beaten tactically.