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by orwin 2948 days ago
The fact that it beat Stockfish9 is not what is impressive with AlphaZero.

What was impressive was the way Stockfish9 was beaten. AlphaZero played like a human player, making sacrifices for position that stockfish thought were detrimental. When it played as white, the fact that is mostly started with the Queen pawn (despite that the King pawn is "best by test") and the way AlphaZero used Stockfish pawnstructure and tempo to basicaly remove a bishop from the game was magical.

Yes, since its a game, it's "useless", but it allowed me (and i'm not the only one) to be a bit better at chess. It's not world hunger, not climate change, it's just a bit of distraction for some people.

PS: I was part of the people thinking that Genetic algorithm+deep learning was not enough to emulate human logical capacities, AlphaZero vs Stockfish games made me admit i was wrong (even if i still think it only works inside well-defined environments)
2 comments
blub 2948 days ago
Two observations:

Just because Fischer preferred 1. e4, it doesn't make it better than other openings. https://en.chessbase.com/post/1-e4-best-by-test-part-1

Playing like a human for me also means making human mistakes. A chess-playing computer playing like a 4000 rated "human" is useless, one that can be configured to play at different ELOs is more interesting, although most can do that and there's no ML needed, nor huge amounts of computing power.

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dragontamer 2947 days ago
> What was impressive was the way Stockfish9 was beaten.

Without its opening database and without its endgame tablebase?

Frankly, the Stockfish vs AlphaZero match was the beginning of the AI Winter in my mind. The fact that they disabled Stockfish's primary databases was incredibly fishy IMO and is a major detriment to their paper.

Stockfish's engine is designed to only work in the midgame of Chess. Remove the opening database and remove the endgame database, and you're not really playing against Stockfish anymore.

The fact that Stockfish's opening was severely gimped is not a surprise to anybody in the Chess community. Stockfish didn't have its opening database enabled... for some reason.

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