[slaveofallah93]

Is it the undisputed champion of chess? I thought that A0 had never played Stockfish 10, the current best engine.

[cepth]

FYI earlier this month, they actually did announce the results of a 1000 game match:

https://www.chess.com/news/view/updated-alphazero-crushes-st....

AlphaZero won 155 games, lost 6, and drew 839 games against Stockfish. Granted, this was against Stockfish 9.

This implies that AlphaZero was roughly +52 Elo rating against Stockfish 9 (https://www.3dkingdoms.com/chess/elo.htm).

Stockfish 10 is currently rated ~32 points higher than Stockfish 9 (http://computerchess.org.uk/ccrl/4040/rating_list_all.html). If we were to do very crude transitive reasoning, you'd expect AlphaZero to still beat Stockfish 10.

EDIT:

So apparently the +155, -6 score was against Stockfish 8. Stockfish 8 is rated by the CCRL list at 3379, with Stockfish 10 rated 85 points stronger than 8.

Worth noting that AlphaZero was only given 4 out of 9 hours of total training time when playing against Stockfish 8 (https://chess24.com/en/read/news/alphazero-really-is-that-go...), but I guess we can't make any real conclusions about AlphaZero vs Stockfish 10.

EDIT 2:

So apparently AlphaZero also "defeated" Stockfish 9, but the preprint of the upcoming paper in Science doesn't seem to provide a crosstable.

It seems that Stockfish 8 was given a 44-core machine to play on, and was not constrained in terms of time spent per move etc.

[ubernostrum]

Generally an "undisputed champion" title would require a level of effort that the AlphaZero team apparently isn't interested in. They like to run matches between AlphaZero and Stockfish in private under their own controlled conditions, and publish the results. The rest of the computer chess world likes to run tournaments in full public view, and there are several entities which run tournaments between engines that way which can be used to gauge the relative strength of the engines.

What will be interesting is to see the effect on Leela (https://github.com/LeelaChessZero/lczero), which is public and open-source, takes part in public tournaments, and is built -- as much as possible, based on what's been disclosed in the papers -- to use the same approach as AlphaZero.

[mindgam3]

Yeah, fair point. I didn't even think to challenge him on that. Technically it's not undisputed given that DeepMind hasn't made it available for any kind of "fair fight" organized outside of its own office. I'm guessing AlphaZero would still win, assuming DeepMind isn't literally faking data, but the only way to be sure is a match between A0 and SF 10.

FYI, Leela Chess Zero is the open-source project inspired by AlphaZero, and they recently did a match against SF 10, details here: https://lichess.org/blog/XA7juREAAC4AxZsR/deathmatch-leela-v...