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DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

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Re: DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

#21

Post by thom »

bsaul wrote: post #17
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #14

Obligatory note that AlphaZero has long since been surpassed by its independently developed cousin Leela Chess Zero(which is also open source btw), and also Stockfish has more than caught up and remains competitive with MCTS engines.

Did stockfish use any tech from alphazero & co ? or has it managed to catch up keeping itself "pure" ?

Stockfish now uses a neural network in some situations. Last I checked, it uses the classical, fast, tactical search and evaluation for active, tactical positions, and uses the network for quieter, more strategic positions.

Re: DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

#22

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

bsaul wrote: post #17
mtlmtlmtlmtl wrote: post #14

Obligatory note that AlphaZero has long since been surpassed by its independently developed cousin Leela Chess Zero(which is also open source btw), and also Stockfish has more than caught up and remains competitive with MCTS engines.

Did stockfish use any tech from alphazero & co ? or has it managed to catch up keeping itself "pure" ?

Stockfish has added neural networks for evaluation, much simpler than the large networks in MCTS engines, and efficiently CPU computable. The technique actually originated in a Shogi engine and was later ported to mainline Stockfish, so there's no direct inheritance from AlphaZero in that sense.

The search algorithms have been incrementally improved, but still follow the same Alpha Beta and a heap of heuristics approach.

Re: DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

#23

Post by mtlmtlmtlmtl »

jorgemf wrote: post #12
kubb wrote: post #3

Must feel pretty bad being a rank and file dev at DeepMind and realizing that your leads had all the talent and funding in the world that they could have used for building language model products and instead they heavily invested in solving board games. Then you realize they get paid >x10 of what you are and they're fine, but the next layoff is likely gonna get you.

Board games have been used in AI since the beginning. They provide a good environment as we know the rules and control them. Also as everybody uses them it is easier to compare different algorithms. Most advances in AI were done in board games. Most probably chatGPT uses lot of those things you think are irrelevant in board games (reinforcement learning for fine tuning the responses with human feedback, same algorith…

If chess was interesting enough for Ken Thompson to work on, that's good enough for me.

Re: DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

#24

Post by tiagod »

londons_explore wrote: post #16

Worth noting that while AlphaGo and AlphaZero are incredible achievements, the amount of actual code to implement them isn't very much. If you have the research paper, someone in the field could reimplement them in a few days. Then there is the large compute cost for training them to produce the trained weights. So, opensourcing these bits of work without the weights isn't as major a thing as you might imagine.

> Then there is the large compute cost for training them to produce the trained weights.

And as far as I understand, the training code is where the secret sauce lies.

Re: DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

#25

Post by blitzar »

kubb wrote: post #3

Must feel pretty bad being a rank and file dev at DeepMind and realizing that your leads had all the talent and funding in the world that they could have used for building language model products and instead they heavily invested in solving board games. Then you realize they get paid >x10 of what you are and they're fine, but the next layoff is likely gonna get you.

They also do work with the UK National Health Service.

I have heard (high level sources, unconfirmed publicly) the YouTube algorithm that promotes open mouth creator with $$$$ signs thumbnails is based on their ground breaking research from this collaboration.

Re: DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

#26

Post by [deleted] »

kubb wrote: post #3

Must feel pretty bad being a rank and file dev at DeepMind and realizing that your leads had all the talent and funding in the world that they could have used for building language model products and instead they heavily invested in solving board games. Then you realize they get paid >x10 of what you are and they're fine, but the next layoff is likely gonna get you.

[deleted]

Re: DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

#27

Post by londons_explore »

tiagod wrote: post #24
londons_explore wrote: post #16

Worth noting that while AlphaGo and AlphaZero are incredible achievements, the amount of actual code to implement them isn't very much. If you have the research paper, someone in the field could reimplement them in a few days. Then there is the large compute cost for training them to produce the trained weights. So, opensourcing these bits of work without the weights isn't as major a thing as you might imagine.

> Then there is the large compute cost for training them to produce the trained weights. And as far as I understand, the training code is where the secret sauce lies.

generally no...

Secret sauce is in the ML compiler and accelerator used, but all those improvements simply lower the cost of training a model. You could still do it on a regular GPU, it would just take you more time.

In the case of Google, they probably used TPU chips that you can't get direct 'bare metal' access to anyway, so none of that code would have helped.

The actual optimizer used and parameters (like the learning rate schedule) is normally published in the research paper.

Re: DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

#28

Post by 10xDev »

teruakohatu wrote: post #11
kubb wrote: post #3

Must feel pretty bad being a rank and file dev at DeepMind and realizing that your leads had all the talent and funding in the world that they could have used for building language model products and instead they heavily invested in solving board games. Then you realize they get paid >x10 of what you are and they're fine, but the next layoff is likely gonna get you.

Google researchers invented Transformers and Deepmind pioneered reinforcement learning.

Deepmind did not pioneer reinforcement learning. In fact it wasn’t even the first place to use neural networks for feature representation in RL. That was achieved with Backgammon in the 90s.

Re: DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

#29

Post by mourner »

Y_Y wrote: post #9
codeflo wrote: post #4

“The heart of” can mean many things, is this runnable or not? Also, they should open source the weights as well so that their claims can finally be verified independently.

Totally agree. I don't even know what benefit they'd get at this point from keeping some parts locked up. Anyway if you want something runnable Leela has a nice reimplementation: https://github.com/leela-zero/leela-zero

I'd suggest KataGo, which is much stronger and more actively developed than Leela Zero https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo

Re: DeepMind has open-sourced the heart of AlphaGo and AlphaZero

#30

Post by mellosouls »

kubb wrote: post #3

Must feel pretty bad being a rank and file dev at DeepMind and realizing that your leads had all the talent and funding in the world that they could have used for building language model products and instead they heavily invested in solving board games. Then you realize they get paid >x10 of what you are and they're fine, but the next layoff is likely gonna get you.

"board games"

ie. Chess and Go. Go a couple of thousand years old, and Chess in particular a core element of AI research history.

Language model research is cool, but you should perhaps consider expanding your horizons beyond the latest headlines in AI.

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