Earlier quoted context omitted.
A lot of the moves most praised by GMs are seen as the only moves in the position by Stockfish 9/10. I think there's a huge amount of cognitive dissonance going on, so that people can label AlphaZero's play more 'human'. Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if AlphaZero lines have existed at the top of the game for some time. Would be a no brainer for someone to have made Google an offer after the first paper.
So if Alpha zero trashes Stockfish 10 will you be saying, Oh Stockfish 11 sees these as only positions.. Please.
How AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
61–70 of 80 posts
Re: How AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
#62Earlier quoted context omitted.
glinscott said "We need a public exhibition match to settle the score, ideally with some GM commentary." above. As for the GM side, Nakamura basically said the same.
Still, zero proof of foul play. But sure i would very much enjoy watching Alphazero destroy Stockfish in a public match.
Re: How AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
#63Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can still run the games past the exact commit of Stockfish they used and it finds blunders in its own play, so it still feels like there's a lack of transparency. But I don't think anyone strongly believes AlphaZero isn't the best at this point.
Like which move? I wonder why stockfish developers do not claim any of this?
Can I just state again, because of your aggressive tone in multiple comments now, that I do believe AlphaZero is stronger, I don't believe there are real shenanigans going on, but it's _still_ sad that we can't reliably, publicly verify this stuff.
Re: How AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
#64Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like which move? I wonder why stockfish developers do not claim any of this?
You can checkout the exact commit of Stockfish from the paper and perform the analysis of the published games yourself. I doubt the Stockfish developers have bothered because it's an old version. Can I just state again, because of your aggressive tone in multiple comments now, that I do believe AlphaZero is stronger, I don't believe there are real shenanigans going on, but it's _still_ sad that we can't reliably, pub…
Re: How AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
#65>> In fact, less than two months later, DeepMind published a preprint of a third paper, showing that the algorithm behind AlphaGo Zero could be generalized to any two-person, zero-sum game of perfect information (that is, a game in which there are no hidden elements, such as face-down cards in poker). I can't find this claim in the linked paper. What I can find is a statement that AlphaZero has demonstrated that 'a g…
Any explanation as to why this should not be used for games without perfect information? As an example, why couldn't the face-down card in poker be modeled as part of the MCTS?
It's AlphaZero's deep neural net component, that's used to learn an evaluation function and move orderings that will need a substantial redesign to take into account imperfect information. The difficulty of this redesign will vary considerably between games- in some games, information is gained throughout the game, by observing another player's moves (e.g. in Poker), in some others an initial state (e.g. a starting deal in card games) dominates the probability that a certain possible board state is the real board state (e.g. Bridge) [1].
On top of that, AphaZero's deep net has the shape of the board and the legal movements of pieces on it hard-coded, as part of the net's structure. That would also need a substantial redesign to accommodate a card game, or any other kind of game without a board and without pieces that move on it. In fact, different card games will require different architectures, most likely. It's very hard to see how, e.g., the same neural net structure could be used to encode both Bridge and Poker rules - and still allow learning chess, shogi and Go.
Given the great variety of board games out there (and that's only classical games, I'm not even considering modern board games, like Settlers, etc) a lot of very hard work would be required to even train AlphaZero to play any game that's not very similar to chess, shogi and go. Not to mention, training AlphaZero is very expensive (wikipedia quotes a cost of $25 million for AlphaGoZero, AlphaZero's predeecssor, and that's just to buy the hardware [2]). So I don't see how or when they'll demonstrate the "general" game playing power of their system.
Basically, I think all that stuff about "generalized" game playing is just so much pointless bragging. The way DeepMind designed AlphaZero is exactly how everyone else has designed their systems- hard-coded with structures appropriate to the targeted game (e.g. boards and pieces, etc). DeepMind are clever in that they chose three very similar games, and then threw an immense amount of money on the problem of solving them all in tandem. And still they had to train different models for each game. That's just no way to get to general game playing.
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[1] See chapter 5. Adversarial Search in AI: A modern approach, 3d Ed. for a discussion of imperfect information and stochastic games and the difficulties of designing evaluation functions for them.
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_Zero#Hardware_cost
Re: How AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
There has been a rematch recently vs Stockfish, with a couple of hundred games. AlphaZero won 155-6! [0] There are fascinating videos with grandmasters commentating on some of the games. They're played in an exciting, sacrificial, swashbuckling style, nothing like any other top computer engine, and it seems that may affect the play of top (human) players for the better. e.g. see Matthew Sadler on chess24 https://www.…
A lot of the moves most praised by GMs are seen as the only moves in the position by Stockfish 9/10. I think there's a huge amount of cognitive dissonance going on, so that people can label AlphaZero's play more 'human'. Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised if AlphaZero lines have existed at the top of the game for some time. Would be a no brainer for someone to have made Google an offer after the first paper.
I think there's a huge amount of cognitive dissonance going on, so that people can label AlphaZero's play more 'human'.
or:
if AlphaZero lines have existed at the top of the game for some time.
Re: How AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
#67The match between Stockfish and AlphaZero was played with certain unjustified parameters (time control, ponder off, different hardware, no opening book or endgame tablebase for Stockfish etc.). By "unjustified," I mean that the authors of the paper did not justify their choice of parameters in the paper as being designed to implement a fair match. At a glance, the parameters of the match seem unfair to me -- and tilt…
There has been a rematch recently vs Stockfish, with a couple of hundred games. AlphaZero won 155-6! [0] There are fascinating videos with grandmasters commentating on some of the games. They're played in an exciting, sacrificial, swashbuckling style, nothing like any other top computer engine, and it seems that may affect the play of top (human) players for the better. e.g. see Matthew Sadler on chess24 https://www.…
If there's no public tournament, this might as well not have happened. I do not understand why Google is always special. Other engines are open, Google can test against Stockfish but not vice versa.
All these web companies take, take, take from Open Source and rarely give back.
I'll write a paper now that I beat Carlsen, but I'll refuse to do so in public.
Re: How AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
#68Earlier quoted context omitted.
what gender pronoun controversy? did we read the same article?
>An expert human player is an expert precisely because her mind automatically identifies the essential parts of the tree and focusses its attention there. Instead of using gender neutral pronoun like "they", the author used a feminine pronoun.
The New Yorker style guide allows the author to use he or she at their discretion. That’s been the norm for hundreds of years.
Re: How AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
>An expert human player is an expert precisely because her mind automatically identifies the essential parts of the tree and focusses its attention there. Instead of using gender neutral pronoun like "they", the author used a feminine pronoun.
It is especially jarring when there is only one woman in the current top 100 chess players, Yifan Hou ranked 86.
Re: How AlphaZero Mastered Its Games
#70Awesome article. Does anyone know how to begin applying the AlphaZero techniques to games where information is NOT perfect? I'm trying to apply it to Scrabble. There hasn't been much AI research in this game and right now the best AI just uses brute force Monte Carlo with a flawed evaluation function (which doesn't take into account the state of the board at all, just points and tiles remaining on the opponent's rack…
If you search "UCT imperfect information" on Google, you'll turn up plenty of articles and slide decks, including one from David Silver that discusses reinforcement learning. The catch is that they're mostly dated before AlphaZero's emergence, so there's some original work involved to extend AlphaZero to this domain. This is likely something that DeepMind is working on themselves. It's possible that tweaking the sear…