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Very Hot Topic (More than 25 Replies) Stockfish dethroned (big time)?! (Read 34475 times)
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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #24 - 12/08/17 at 16:39:37
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The Stockfish community is indeed having a closer look at this. They're discussing, running tests and so on - scientists/engineers at work.
On the one hand, there is some reserverdness due to AlphaZero competing against a considerably lobotomized Stockfish, hardware issues being one point (opening books and tablebases being the other ones). On the other hand, there is no doubt that AlphaZero is a giant leap for chess. Everybody is biting his fingernails, waiting for the more thorough paper.
  
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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #23 - 12/08/17 at 16:07:41
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bragesjo wrote on 12/08/17 at 14:23:37:
The ultimate thing would be if someone had access to two identical super computers with 64 threads and Stockfish met itself and 1 engine gets 1 gb ram and the other something extremly high like 32 gb ram and see if the performance is differenent at the same time control and rules used in the match.

EDIT
It is not 100% shure that there will be any perfomance increases considering the many threads and low time control. I may well end up the other way.  My knowledge of super computers is non existing I only know how my laptop works.



As a scientist, I agree that this would be interesting (though I would surely not call it the ultimate thing). However, as pointed out earlier in the thread, the result is astonishing no matter what.

But I also think that the team set up Stockfish in a sub-optimal way. The hash size, AFAIK, if set up properly will affect the calculations. It doesn't matter if there are many threads in this case, as they have to compute several lines over and over, as opposed to just keep those in the hash, right?
  
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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #22 - 12/08/17 at 14:23:37
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The ultimate thing would be if someone had access to two identical super computers with 64 threads and Stockfish met itself and 1 engine gets 1 gb ram and the other something extremly high like 32 gb ram and see if the performance is differenent at the same time control and rules used in the match.

EDIT
It is not 100% shure that there will be any perfomance increases considering the many threads and low time control. I may well end up the other way.  My knowledge of super computers is non existing I only know how my laptop works.


  
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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #21 - 12/08/17 at 14:19:10
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Actually, it's irrelevant, if Stockfish's performance could have been improved at some point, this self learning algorithm is obviously superior to any approach so far and we have to get used to it, that in some cases no human influence is needed or helpful. This development will obviously shatter our whole life in many branches and maybe we only have to work two hours a week, because all standard work will be solved by an algorithm and we just check the results.
  

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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #20 - 12/08/17 at 13:22:50
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ReneDescartes wrote on 12/08/17 at 12:13:55:
bragesjo wrote on 12/08/17 at 09:08:48:
The one thing I still dont understand is why Stockfish got 64 threads and only 1 GB ram?

My presumption is that some pre-testing testing was done and that those were the conditions that produced the best-looking results.

This would surprise me immensely. I'm not going to say it has non-zero probability, but it would be considered a really strong and nasty accusation in the machine-learning community and if they did it they would be aware that they were severely violating academic standards.

I do think it's quite likely that they set up Stockfish naively without worrying much about optimizing its performance, but it would really astonish me if they tried out lots of Stockfishes and picked the one that performed the worst.
  
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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #19 - 12/08/17 at 13:13:52
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GabrielGale wrote on 12/08/17 at 08:48:25:
@bonsai, without having read the paper as yet, I agree that the whole exercise looks as if it was not optimised, a bit rushed?

I think they were less interested in creating the best possible chess engine than in showing that their approach was sufficient to create a better-than-state-of-the-art chess engine.

For example, adding tablebases would make it stronger (there's basically no downside), but from an academic point of view it's not interesting at all and in fact would lessen the magnitude of the result, because it would test the neural-net/MCTS framework less by not forcing it to learn low-material endgames.

(Maybe if they had beefed up Stockfish more, they would have had to do more work to optimize AlphaZero!)

Quote:
perhaps rushing for bragging rights before end of the year?

The paper was released during NIPS, the biggest AI conference of the year, and I'm sure the timing was not coincidental.
  
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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #18 - 12/08/17 at 12:13:55
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bragesjo wrote on 12/08/17 at 09:08:48:
The one thing I still dont understand is why Stockfish got 64 threads and only 1 GB ram?
When I analyse chess games I give it access to way more ram on my laptop.
It effects gameplay greatly at least on "normal laptops" but what happends with super computers with 64 threads I have no clue or on short time controls...




My presumption is that some pre-testing testing was done and that those were the conditions that produced the best-looking results. Don't forget, an enormous amount of prestige comes with this, worth many millions of dollars in corporate reputation. Google know exactly what they are doing with respect to hardware. AlphaZero may not be ready to beat Stockfish at 40 ply yet. Nevertheless, it's still terrifying that it did this in four hours, even if that's the equivalent of a year on a normal cluster: AlphaZero was not designed for chess but is a generalist.
  
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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #17 - 12/08/17 at 09:08:48
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The one thing I still dont understand is why Stockfish got 64 threads and only 1 GB ram?
When I analyse chess games I give it access to way more ram on my laptop.
It effects gameplay greatly at least on "normal laptops" but what happends with super computers with 64 threads I have no clue or on short time controls...


  
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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #16 - 12/08/17 at 08:56:45
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PS, as has been noted, the man behind DeepMind is a former highly talented junior chess player (no 2 in the world at the time??) who turned to computing.
For your consideration, the GM who currently holds the record of being the 2nd youngest person to become a GM, Parimarjan Negi, also highly regarded chess author and noted chess opening theoretician, is studying at Stanford in computing.
What can we expect ......!!!???
Perhaps Google should snap him up! before graduation ......
  

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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #15 - 12/08/17 at 08:48:25
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@dfan, thanks for your reply. I missed that bit re authors.
I agree that deep learning/machine learning is currently the method. I am not familiar with events after AlphaGo but my initial thot, hence my query, was that deep learning is not that compatible with the current approach of chess engine programmers where it is merely crunching plies and which is why there is a need for GM consultants to provide parameters? I may be wrong??
@bonsai, without having read the paper as yet, I agree that the whole exercise looks as if it was not optimised, a bit rushed? perhaps rushing for bragging rights before end of the year?
I agree that with proper GM trainer as consultant ie providing scaffolding on how to train, the results could have been even more impressive. (yes, imagine Aagaard as consultant!?)
From bonsai's suggestions, I see a great advantages for chess players and for improvement for chess players the world around: if ever this gets to be affordable (trickle-down effect), we are looking at AI-powered personal chess trainers with personalised training regime targeted at specific weaknesses and strengths (throw in deliberate practice) and I think we are possibly looking at human performance beyond elo 3000. Of course this also may mean, GMs are going to get younger and younger. Also think what this means for older chess players who want to improve: Personal trainers.
  

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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #14 - 12/08/17 at 06:40:22
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To some extent what these guys did was not even that optimized for chess (!). You would think it should be possible to do what they did in a more domain specific way and to add some other tweaks to make it even stronger (if nothing else train for longer, train vs. variants of itself and/or really good chess engines). I.e. as a statisticians with a little bit of involvment in machine learning, I suspect that one could train the neural net for longer in more sophisticated ways and get even better performance. I guess they also have not truly fully evaluated its strength in all areas of play. E.g. is there points being left on the table by sub-optimal endgame play, are there openings/pawn structures it does play as well as the rest (and then, how could one fix that, e.g. link in tablebases somehow, make it play lots of endgames or games in specific openening etc.)... Those things could theoretically be weaknesses, unless the program gets into these situation often enough during training.

I'm sure there's a lot of things one could try to achieve here. Perhaps you could also train flashy creative neural nets (perhaps seeding from Tal's games and giving a higher slightly higher score for a flashier game with sacrifices - however you judge that). You might even manage to get more human-like dumbed down AIs with certain personalities. And finally, to really get carried away into a lack of realism: we give a neural net a large database as the data, some opening positions & the matching Quality Chesss books as the training set and then give it a new opening position and hope it writes us a book.  Wink
  
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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #13 - 12/07/17 at 21:35:26
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GabrielGale wrote on 12/07/17 at 20:21:04:
Two curious question for those with the expertise: Is this so-called deep neural net viable for the future AI?

Deep Learning is arguably the most successful current AI technique (it certainly has the most buzz within the larger field) and shows no sign of becoming obsolete soon. Who knows what will be prevalent in ten years, though.

Quote:
How does this compare to the modest effort of a single postgrad paper last year on similar undertaking (one with Giraffe in the title)?

The Giraffe author (Matthew Lai) joined DeepMind and is a coauthor of the AlphaZero paper. Smiley

Quote:
BTW, DM seems to think the current method of programming chess engine will become obsolete.

It's a little hard to claim that when current-tech engines are already much better than the strongest humans. Certainly programmers vying to create the world's strongest engine will be pretty interested in these techniques, though. When the first AlphaGo paper came out, the best other Go programs jumped hundreds of Elo effectively overnight by copying AlphaGo's ideas, but I think that will be much harder to do in the domain of chess.
  
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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #12 - 12/07/17 at 20:21:04
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Chessbase has a report but I think Chess24 was one of the first ones to report. Their report seems to suggest Stockfish was not too disadvantaged except perhaps in opening books. Caveat: I have yet to read the academic paper. In modern computer chess, opening book is important but bear in mind that int he TCEC, the first two rounds, the openings are fixed by an independent 3P and the contestants have to play form a certain position 4 moves deep.
Dana Mackenzie also has a report and he has some interesting thoughts on the (in)famous Table 2 (my prediction on it future fame). He seems to have read the academic paper and being a professional mathematician, will probably understand more than me. There is no explanation as why AlphaGZ gave up on Caro Kann or the French nor why it seemed to have avoided the Indian Defences or the Sicilian. It seems the QGB was favoured (again without any explanation but good news for the sale of recently published book from QC Smiley). Indeed, one of DM's comment was that the computer programmes are yet unable to articulate "why" which he thinks is crucially a human skill and therefore, ergo, AI is not human yet! (caveat: Also at the same time publicising his later co-authored book on Causation and effect!!).
Personally, I am impressed and think this is an important step.
Two curious question for those with the expertise: Is this so-called deep neural net viable for the future AI?
How does this compare to the modest effort of a single postgrad paper last year on similar undertaking (one with Giraffe in the title)?
BTW, DM seems to think the current method of programming chess engine will become obsolete.
  

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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #11 - 12/07/17 at 19:57:54
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Very interesting link;
page 19:

Program
AlphaZero Stockfish Elmo
Chess
80k 70,000k
Shogi Go 40k 16k
35,000k
  Table S4: shogi and Go.

Stockfish calculated 70 million position per seconds - should be enough.
Another observation: this algorithm isn't interested in indian positions and Sicilian defence and the stronger it gets, the more it dislikes the french and the Caro-Kann and prefers the Berlin.
  

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Re: Stockfish dethroned (big time)?!
Reply #10 - 12/07/17 at 13:40:58
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IsaVulpes wrote on 12/06/17 at 12:19:53:
https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf if you want a more detailed explanation of .. everything


Thanks, very interesting, especially

"Finally, we analysed the chess knowledge discovered by AlphaZero. Table 2 analyses the
most common human openings (those played more than 100,000 times in an online database
of human chess games (1)). Each of these openings is independently discovered and played
frequently by AlphaZero during self-play training. When starting from each human opening,
AlphaZero convincingly defeated Stockfish, suggesting that it has indeed mastered a wide spectrum
of chess play."

and what it discovered  Shocked
  

Those who want to go by my perverse footsteps play such pawn structure with fuzzy atypical still strategic orientations

Clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right, stuck in the middlegame with you
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