source: chess.com(news) - any thoughts?
Meanwhile Chess.com also received a lengthy comment from one of the original Stockfish authors, Tord Romstad, which we'll give in full:
The match results by themselves are not particularly meaningful because of the rather strange choice of time controls and Stockfish parameter settings: The games were played at a fixed time of 1 minute/move, which means that Stockfish has no use of its time management heuristics (lot of effort has been put into making Stockfish identify critical points in the game and decide when to spend some extra time on a move; at a fixed time per move, the strength will suffer significantly). The version of Stockfish used is one year old, was playing with far more search threads than has ever received any significant amount of testing, and had way too small hash tables for the number of threads. I believe the percentage of draws would have been much higher in a match with more normal conditions.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that AlphaZero could have played better if more work had been put into the project (although the "4 hours of learning" mentioned in the paper is highly misleading when you take into account the massive hardware resources used during those 4 hours). But in any case, Stockfish vs AlphaZero is very much a comparison of apples to orangutans. One is a conventional chess program running on ordinary computers, the other uses fundamentally different techniques and is running on custom designed hardware that is not available for purchase (and would be way out of the budget of ordinary users if it were).
From another perspective, the apples vs orangutans angle is the most exciting thing about this: We now have two extremely different (both on the hardware and the software side) man-made entities that both display super-human chess playing abilities. That's much more interesting than yet another chess program that does the same thing as existing chess programs, just a little better. Furthermore, the adaptability of the AlphaZero approach to new domains opens exciting possibilities for the future.
For chess players using computer chess programs as a tool, this breakthrough is unlikely to have a great impact, at least in the short term, because of the lack of suitable hardware for affordable prices.
For chess engine programmers -- and for programmers in many other interesting domains -- the emergence of machine learning techniques that require massive hardware resources in order to be effective is a little disheartening. In a few years, it is quite possible that an AlphaZero like chess program can be made to run on ordinary computers, but the hardware resources required to _create_ them will still be way beyond the budget of hobbyists or average sized companies. It is possible that an open source project with a large distributed network of computers run by volunteers could work, but the days of hundreds of unique chess engines, each with their own individual quirks and personalities, will be gone.
www.chess.com/news/view/alphazero-reactions-from-top-gms-stockfish-author
Meanwhile Chess.com also received a lengthy comment from one of the original Stockfish authors, Tord Romstad, which we'll give in full:
The match results by themselves are not particularly meaningful because of the rather strange choice of time controls and Stockfish parameter settings: The games were played at a fixed time of 1 minute/move, which means that Stockfish has no use of its time management heuristics (lot of effort has been put into making Stockfish identify critical points in the game and decide when to spend some extra time on a move; at a fixed time per move, the strength will suffer significantly). The version of Stockfish used is one year old, was playing with far more search threads than has ever received any significant amount of testing, and had way too small hash tables for the number of threads. I believe the percentage of draws would have been much higher in a match with more normal conditions.
On the other hand, there is no doubt that AlphaZero could have played better if more work had been put into the project (although the "4 hours of learning" mentioned in the paper is highly misleading when you take into account the massive hardware resources used during those 4 hours). But in any case, Stockfish vs AlphaZero is very much a comparison of apples to orangutans. One is a conventional chess program running on ordinary computers, the other uses fundamentally different techniques and is running on custom designed hardware that is not available for purchase (and would be way out of the budget of ordinary users if it were).
From another perspective, the apples vs orangutans angle is the most exciting thing about this: We now have two extremely different (both on the hardware and the software side) man-made entities that both display super-human chess playing abilities. That's much more interesting than yet another chess program that does the same thing as existing chess programs, just a little better. Furthermore, the adaptability of the AlphaZero approach to new domains opens exciting possibilities for the future.
For chess players using computer chess programs as a tool, this breakthrough is unlikely to have a great impact, at least in the short term, because of the lack of suitable hardware for affordable prices.
For chess engine programmers -- and for programmers in many other interesting domains -- the emergence of machine learning techniques that require massive hardware resources in order to be effective is a little disheartening. In a few years, it is quite possible that an AlphaZero like chess program can be made to run on ordinary computers, but the hardware resources required to _create_ them will still be way beyond the budget of hobbyists or average sized companies. It is possible that an open source project with a large distributed network of computers run by volunteers could work, but the days of hundreds of unique chess engines, each with their own individual quirks and personalities, will be gone.
www.chess.com/news/view/alphazero-reactions-from-top-gms-stockfish-author
