New Fat Fritz-Available On The Chessbase Cloud for Testing...
"Fat Fritz – What on Earth is that?
by Albert Silver
8/13/2019 – It's a semi-secret development, an AlphaZero clone, engineered over the past nine months for ChessBase. Fat Fritz was tested by some of the best players in the world, who expressed unmitigated delight over the ideas and improvements it came up with. Now the program is publicly available on the ChessBase Engine Cloud. And it is running on awesome hardware. ALBERT SILVER explains."
Genesis
You probably know AlphaZero. It is a computer program that was developed by DeepMind in late 2017, an artificial intelligence research company founded by Demis Hassabis and subsequently purchased by Google. This AI program used awe inspiring hardware — 5000 custom tensor processing units (TPUs) to self-play tens of millions of games, and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks. It used no form of external chess knowledge but worked everything out from zero (hence the name). After four hours of work AlphaZero was playing better than the best brute force programs in the world. Here's a ChessBase description of the development: The future is here — AlphaZero learns chess.
Demis has been a friend of ChessBase co-founder Frederic Friedel since the mid 1990s, and his company was quite relaxed about the project and revealing the methods used to generate AlphaZero.
One of the project managers, Thore Gräpel, research lead at Google DeepMind and Professor of Computer Science at the University College London, came to visit ChessBase in Hamburg, where he held a talk for half a dozen of our talented programmers. They went away inspired, determined to learn more about this kind of computer intelligence, and embark on AI projects themselves.
"The Woosh
Back in late September 2018, I had been working on a program called “Deus X”, which was designed to explore and challenge the idea that learning from the best humans and engines, other than itself, would lead to a worse result. Using the open-source project Leela Chess as a foundation, which itself was an attempt to reproduce AlphaZero for the PC, I trained a neural network using millions of top human games from Mega Database and Correspondence Database, as well as engine vs engine games from the Playchess server and the CCRL ratings list. However, I did not reject self-play as a resource. I was only trying to prove that self-play was not the only valid source of content."
"I wanted to round this off with self-play in its mature state, but lacked the resources to do so. I then spoke with my old friend Frederic Friedel, who expressed great interest in my ideas and agreed to help me. In early October 2018 he asked his son Tommy and nephew Noah to build him a really powerful computing machine. They bought the components, consisting of a 12-core processor and two state-of-the-art graphics cards that had just been released. These cards have thousands of graphic and tensor core processor units (GPUs and TPU), originally intended to power 3D video display in games as well as ray-tracing lighting effects. But it turns out that the processors are eminently suited for neural network development.
It is interesting to consider that if this machine had existed around the year 2000 it would have been the most powerful computer in the world!"
"After it was installed, Fred had a very powerful AI machine humming in his home office. Humming? Actually it is a fairly loud whirring sound of multiple fans, dissipating the heat from the 600 watts of energy the computer consumes. That heated the room during the cold Hamburg winter to a very comfortable 23°C, with central heating turned off. The constant sounds of the fans led it to be fondly referred to as “The Woosh”."
"So what do we do with the super-machine? Fred offered me the chance to upload tools that were needed to build a neural network for chess, and once that was completed the machine went to work, playing an average 50,000 games per day against itself. I built myself a second, comparable machine which downloaded the games from the Woosh and learned from them – and from other games. Despite this sizable personal investment, and two strong computers, the project still had a thousand-fold hardware disadvantage when compared to AlphaZero, and at least hundred-fold compared to the community-driven effort Leela Chess. Nevertheless the hybrid mix soon came together in ways even our most optimistic thinking could not have predicted. Not only was it playing at superhuman levels of chess strength, but more importantly it did so in a completely new way, not with brute force tactics but with positional ideas that it has come up with, after studying millions of games and billions of positions."
"Learning from human and computer games
To check the overall playing strength we entered an early version to compete in a well-respected computer tournament held in Leiden, Netherlands, and run by Jan Krabbenbos. It brought together not just the best PC programs around, but also unique efforts such as Jonny, a project that runs on a university server backed by 2400 CPU cores. As a matter of fact Jonny was using a hybrid neural network itself, as part of its makeup, and had beaten Leela in their individual game at the World Computer Championship. So it was not to be underestimated.
After four rounds, the leader was Jonny with a perfect score, followed by “Deus X” (the Fat Fritz prototype) with 3½ out of 4. We locked horns in round five, and after a tough battle, Deus X came out victorious with black, taking over the lead. After seven rounds, we had won the competition with 6 out of 7. That made it the first neural network to win a computer chess tournament. We showed the games to a couple of GM friends for their opinions, and one game stood out to them as utterly unique and beautiful in the attack the neural network built and conducted. See for Yourself (Chessbase Cloud)"
Deux X vs Arasan TCEC 13 2018
[pgn]1. e4 c6 2. Nf3 d5 3. Nc3 Nf6 4. e5 Ne4 5. Ne2 Qb6 6. d4 e6 7. Ng3 c5 8. Bd3 Nxg3 9. hxg3 cxd4 10. Nxd4 Bc5 11. c3 Nc6 12. Nxc6 Bxf2+ 13. Kf1 bxc6 14. Qg4 g6 15. Qf3 Bc5 16. b4 Be7 17. Be3 c5 18. bxc5 Qa5 19. Kg1 Bxc5 20. Bd4 O-O 21. Qe3 Qxc3 22. Bxc5 Qxa1+ 23. Kh2 Qb2 24. Rb1 Qc3 25. Rc1 Qa5 26. Be7 f5 27. exf6 d4 28. Qh6 Qh5+ 29. Qxh5 gxh5 30. Bxf8 Kxf8 31. Rc7 Rb8 32. Rxh7 Rb7 33. Rh8+ Kf7 34. Rxc8 a5 35. Rc4 Kxf6 36. Rxd4 Rc7 37. Rc4 Rd7 38. Be4 Rd2 39. Ra4 Re2 40. Bf3 Re5 41. Rf4+ Ke7 1-0[/pgn]
