[porphyra]

The Deepmind chess paper was also criticized for unfair evaluation, as they were using an older version of Stockfish for comparison. Apparently, the gap between AlphaZero and that old version of Stockfish (about 50 elo iirc) was about the same as the gap between consecutive versions of Stockfish.

[lacker]

Indeed, six years later, the AlphaZero algorithm is not the best performing algorithm for chess. LCZero (uses AlphaZero algorithm) won some TCECs after it came out but for the past few years Stockfish (does not use AlphaZero algorithm) has been winning consistently.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship

So perhaps the critics had a point there.

[vlovich123]

There’s a lot of codevelopment happening in the space where the positions are evaluated by Leela and then used to train the NNUE net within stockfish. And Leela comes from AlphaZero. So basically AlphaZero was directly responsible for opening up new avenues of research for a more specialized chess engine to reach new levels than it could have without it.

> Generally considered to be the strongest GPU engine, it continues to provide open data which is essential for training our NNUE networks. They released version 0.31.1 of their engine a few weeks ago, check it out!

[1]

I’d say the impact AlphaZero has had on chess and go can’t be understated considering it’s a general algorithm that at worst is highly competitive with purpose built engines. And that’s ignoring the actual point of why DeepMind is doing any of this which is for GAI (that’s why they’re not constantly trying to compete with existing engines)

[1] https://lichess.org/@/StockfishNews/blog/stockfish-17-is-her...

[theodorthe5]

Do you understand StockFish filled the gap only after using NNs as well in the evaluation function? And that was a direct consequence of AlphaZero research.