imho fascinating experiment, even if it didn't produce world class Elo.
For one thing, statelessness deprives it of easy solutions to repetition and endgame decisiveness.
Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
71–80 of 133 posts
Re: Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
#72While its performance against humans is very impressive indeed, its performance against engines is somewhat less so: > Our agent’s aggressive style is highly successful against human opponents and achieves a grandmasterlevel Lichess Elo of 2895. However, we ran another instance of the bot and allowed other engines to play it. Its estimated Elo was far lower, i.e., 2299. Its aggressive playing style does not work as w…
This sounds a lot like Mikhail Tal!
Re: Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
#73Slightly off topic but am I the only one that approaches strategy games by making a "zeroth order approximation". Eg find the shortest path to victory under the (obviously faulty) assumption that my opponent does nothing and the board is unchanging except for my moves. Now find my opponents shortest path to victory under the same assumption. Then evaluate, if we both just ignore each other and try to bum rush the vic…
Can't you almost always win the game in a few moves if you plan for your opponent to make really stupid responses?
Re: Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
#74Slightly off topic but am I the only one that approaches strategy games by making a "zeroth order approximation". Eg find the shortest path to victory under the (obviously faulty) assumption that my opponent does nothing and the board is unchanging except for my moves. Now find my opponents shortest path to victory under the same assumption. Then evaluate, if we both just ignore each other and try to bum rush the vic…
If you programmed this as a chess strategy, it would probably result in an engine that played the Scholar's mate every game. This is actually close to what low Elo players do in chess, but as you get closer to 800-ish ELO the probability of attempted scholar mates drop dramatically (likely due to it being an opening that isn't that good).
Re: Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
#75I think this is an interesting finding from a practical perspective. A function which can reliably approximate stockfish at a certain depth could replace it, basically "compressing" search to a set depth. And unlike NNUE which is optimized for CPU, a neural network is highly parallelizable on GPU meaning you could send all possible future positions (at depth N) through the network and use the results for a primitive…
The Stockfish installer is ~45 MB. At 16 bits per parameter, the 270B model would be over 500 MB. The 9B model would be smaller than Stockfish, but you could probably find a smaller chess engine that achieves 2000 ELO.
Re: Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
#76Well without explicit search would probably be more accurate. They note that though in the paper: >Since transformers may learn to roll out iterative computation (which arises in search) across layers, deeper networks may hold the potential for deeper unrolls.
We don’t know if it’s using implicit search either. While it would be interesting if the network was doing some internal search, it’s also possible it has just memorized the evaluations from 10M games and is performing some function of the similarity of the input to those previously seen.
If the Transformer was 'just' memorizing, you would expect width scaling to work much better than depth scaling (because width enables memorization much more efficiently), and you also wouldn't expect depth to run into problems, because it's not like memorization is that complex - but it does suggest that it's learning some more complicated algorithm which has issues with vanishing gradients & learning multiple serial steps, and the obvious complicated algorithm to be learning in this context would be an implicit search akin to the MuZero RNN (which, incidentally, doesn't need any symbolic solver like Stockfish to learn superhuman chess from scratch by self-play).
Re: Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
#77There is rampant misunderstanding of some parts of this article; allow me to help :) The "no-search" chess engine uses search (Stockfish) in in two ways: 1. To score positions in the training data. This is only training data, no search is performed when actually playing. 2. To play moves when the position has many options with a 99% win rate. This is to prevent pathological behavior in already won positions, and is n…
>> 1. To score positions in the training data. This is only training data, no search is performed when actually playing. That's like saying you can have eggs without chickens, because when you make an omelette you don't add chickens. It's completely meaningless and a big fat lie to boot. The truth is that the system created by DeepMind consists of two components: a search-based system used to annotate a dataset of mo…
> That's like saying you can have eggs without chickens, because when you make an omelette you don't add chickens.
I just took it in the same way as saying that being a vegetarian is generally better for animal welfare, as you're not harming chickens as directly by eating an omelette, as you would by eating their wings.
Re: Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
#78argmax and argmin are searching. Just because it isn't a search with a lot of depth that doesn't mean it isn't searching.
Re: Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
#79Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 1. To score positions in the training data. This is only training data, no search is performed when actually playing. That's like saying you can have eggs without chickens, because when you make an omelette you don't add chickens. It's completely meaningless and a big fat lie to boot. The truth is that the system created by DeepMind consists of two components: a search-based system used to annotate a dataset of mo…
It doesn't matter where the egg came from, just that it is an egg. It could have luckily coalesced from gas (a Boltzmann egg), or perhaps even more radically, been laid by a duck. you say >They didn't train their system by self-play and they certainly didn't hire an army of low-paid workers to annotate moves for them. So you are certainly aware that there are avenues to creating the data set. Given that, it is quite…
Neither of those has been shown to produce equivalent training data, no.
They should do one of those instead of using search before they claim it’s possible to not use search.
Or to borrow your analogy, you’ll need to show me a duck egg to prove you can make omelettes without chickens. Making an omelette from chicken eggs and claiming hypothetically some mystery other animal could have done it is nonsense.
Re: Grandmaster-Level Chess Without Search
#80How much of this "grandmaster-level" play is an artifact of low time controls? I notice they only achieve GM ELO in Blitz against humans, achieve significantly worse ELO against bots, and do not provide the "Lichess Blitz ELO" of any of their benchmark approaches.