The coming exponential increase in AI - discussion of exponential progress...

[Valentin Albillo]

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Hi, Pier:

(07-20-2018 08:37 PM)pier4r Wrote:  Google trained their self adjusting heuristic to beat one of the strongest chess programs of the moment, Stockfish 8 (although Stockfish had several components disabled). Stockfish is quite an hardcoded heuristic. After 44 millions of self played games, alpha zero chess played stockfish 100 times with no losses and 28 wins.

Biased information: Google told the specialized press that AlphaZero won the 100-game match (which no knowledgeable expert was allowed to see) by a final score of 28 wins, 72 draws, 0 loses. Notice the "0 loses", which gives the impression that Stockfish was unable to defeat AlphaZero not even once.

However, in another test of 1,200-games between the two, AlphaZero won 290, draw 886 and *lost* 24 games.

Thus, a buggy version of Stockfish 8, without opening book (!!!), with dismayingly small transposition tables, configured with an excessive number of threads, without endgame tablebases and without advanced time management, and last-but-not-least running in hardware orders of magnitude slower, even despite being so maddeningly and unfairly handicapped still managed to win 24 games against the 180-teraflop supercomputer.

Of course everything is propietary, no independent experts saw or supervised the games, there was no "peer review" of any kind, and Google neither sells the TPUs nor gives information, nothing, so in my humble opinion, this "AlphaZero versus Stockfish" was but a marketing device to get as much worldwide publicity as possible in order to try and get paid wholesale for their expensive products and services, some people made a lot of money either for their biased opinions or else for their silence, and that's it.

Oh, and they succeeded, the worldwide publicity was phenomenal.

Regards and have a nice weekend.
V.
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