I just read a interesting and profound statement by Chessbase's Albert Silver originating from a discussion on the double edged 'Kings Indian Defence' (A Fischer and Kasparov Favorite, currently under a cloud) many modern GM's are veering into other indian lines at the moment...
"While it enjoyed its spot in the sun with its last great proponent in Garry Kasparov, the latter’s inability to overcome his rival Vladimir Kramnik with it, leading him to actually stop playing it, was a hammer blow. Almost as if dictated by fate, the rise of the chess engines was around this time, with Fritz at the top, later followed by Rybka, Houdini and more, and they all seemed to universally condemn the opening with extremely positive evaluations for White, which were only reversed by a mistake or blunder. The conclusion one might draw from this is that while the KID might offer plenty of practical chances, it is fundamentally suspect."
........"Or is it?".........
"Fat Fritz offers a very different perspective on this, and it is not just because it is a neural network. It is also because of how it was trained and developed. When I began training it, the idea was not only to offer it the bulk of human genius from Mega Database, but to see it learn about all the openings that exist. This does not mean it will necessary like them, just that if it doesn’t, its opinion will have come from the practical study of millions of positions. This highlights one of the major differences compared to the ‘zero’ approach used by AlphaZero. The ‘zero’ approach accurately claims to remove all human bias, since in effect it is learning solely from games played against itself, but its proponents fail to highlight that instead this introduces significant biases of its own.
Reinforcement Learning Paper (Alpha Zero)
https://kstatic.googleusercontent.com/f ... 45072dc7bd
"The published article on AlphaZero, and even the excellent book on it by GM Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan, clearly show that while AlphaZero may be incredibly strong, it is also a super specialist in very specific openings. When allowed to steer the games towards openings of its choice, it did unusually well, but if greater variety were enforced the results were much less impressive. Was this because some of these other openings were inherently flawed or because its skills were not as universally strong in all of them? I suspect a bit of both."
This fact was noticed from the beginning of the AlphaZero-LC0 Era...."Playing a extremely limited number of openings
(Ex.. D4 or C4 with white or white side of queens indian defense) but playing them extremely well'...Is this some "fatal flaw?' Unknown..."Time will tell"......
