4 ms·
It doesn't seem to like the Sicilian Defense (1.e4 c5), which is the most popular opening by human players. I wonder if this will change opening theory?
by luckyt 9y ago
It doesn't seem to like the Sicilian Defense (1.e4 c5), which is the most popular opening by human players. I wonder if this will change opening theory?
- SubiculumCode 9y agoThat's stunning. I thought that was one of the strongest openings for black.
- SubiculumCode 9y agoIt seemed to play a lot of English Opening...that also seems strange to me.
- thom 9y agoI think in a way it’s an opening that rewards preparation and theory. With near perfect play expected on both sides, what seem like sharp games to humans are quite easily navigable.
- Isofarro 9y agoNot strongest opening, but because it's an asymmetric opening system, which introduces imbalance into the position, thus it tends to have less drawish tendencies than a symmetric opening system. This creates the psychological effect of slightly turning the knob of "Black is playing for equality", to "Black is playing for counter-play".
- dnsva 9y agoCombinations appear in Sicilian often. If you're playing black, that's a good thing depending on your rating.
- dnsva 9y agoA list of openings in recent world champions: https://www.chess.com/blog/ih8sens/world-championship-openings https://www.chess.com/blog/ih8sens/world-championship-openin... Queen's gambit is there.
- gjm11 9y agoIt looks as if it doesn't play 1.e4 much as white. Since these statistics are for self-play games, that means it won't get a lot of opportunities to play 1.e4 c5 as black. Still, it does seem as if it likes the Ruy Lopez and French better as black than it does the Sicilian. (It would be nice to see a little opening "tree" with move probabilities, rather than this list of 12 most-popular-among-humans openings.) [EDITED to add:] A couple of other remarks: Playing against Stockfish, the Sicilian seems to give it more wins as white and more losses as black than any of the other openings listed here. What's shown here are two particular versions of the Sicilian; for all we know there's a lot more 1.e4 c5 in its self-play than the graphs suggest (e.g., maybe as white it prefers 2.c3 or 2.Nc3 or something). Eyeballing those graphs, these 12 openings account for substantially less than half of AlphaZero's self-play games.
- defertoreptar 9y agoI thought it was interesting that it seems to like the English Opening. It's not popular, but Bobby Fischer played it in the world championship against Spassky.