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Still, when you look at the games, it's hard not to think something genuinely new has happened. Several grandmasters have expressed amazement at the style of p

Still, when you look at the games, it's hard not to think something genuinely new has happened. Several grandmasters have expressed amazement at the style of play. AlphaZero won some games in a romantic style that's reminiscent of old champions. It's definitely not the kind of play we've been accustomed to with chess engines : AlphaZero seems to rely on a deep strategic understanding of piece placement and dynamism opportunities. It's difficult to attribute some of these wins to a simple superiority in computing power.

espadrine 9y ago
> AlphaZero won some games in a romantic style The difference in style is likely influenced by the insertion of historical boards as input to the neural network. The sequence of moves are therefore more likely to look related to one another.
- grondilu 9y ago
  The neural network was only fed with games from self-play. No historical game whatsoever was given. At least that's Deepmind's claim.
  - espadrine 9y ago
    I was misunderstood. By historical, I mean, it includes the past N boards, which pushes the network to make actions correlated to the previous actions performed. That is similar to how humans play.
no_gravity 9y ago
Imagine a computer with a simple brute force algorithm but unlimited computing power. It would win 100:0 against AZ. Would the grandmasters look at the games and say "Yes, it won every time but it's style is rather clumsy"?
- grondilu 9y ago
  There is no unlimited computing power anywhere, though. Not even in Google's quarters. The style difference is so profound that it is difficult to impute computing power only, because we know what kind of improvement reasonable computing power gives : it makes the engine stronger but does not quite change its style.
- joefkelley 9y ago
  Hard to say, since we don't know what such perfect play would look like. But I expect it would look quite boring, yes. It's important to state, though, that calling an engine's play "romantic" is not a value judgement. Stockfish and other engines play in a way that give a clear concrete advantage after X moves, whereas AlphaZero relatively prefers move that are "creative" or "beautiful" in the sense that there's less of a clear definite benefit, but instead some sort of slight positional advantage or more attacking chances or something similar. It's harder to prove that it was a good move, but it just "feels" good. In that sense humans enjoy it either since it's surprising, or maybe closer to how we're able to think. As an example, there is one game I saw analyzed where AlphaZero gradually gives up more and more material with little clear compensation, but gradually its position gets better and better, until Stockfish is completely out of good moves. It then turns the corner, snatches up more material than it gave up, and converts into a winning end-game. Such imbalanced style of play is much more interesting to watch than previous computer slogs of slowly jockying for slight advantages until one side can grab a pawn without giving up much and build into a win from there.

espadrine 9y ago

> AlphaZero won some games in a romantic style The difference in style is likely influenced by the insertion of historical boards as input to the neural network. The sequence of moves are therefore more likely to look related to one another.

grondilu 9y ago
The neural network was only fed with games from self-play. No historical game whatsoever was given. At least that's Deepmind's claim.
- espadrine 9y ago
  I was misunderstood. By historical, I mean, it includes the past N boards, which pushes the network to make actions correlated to the previous actions performed. That is similar to how humans play.

no_gravity 9y ago

Imagine a computer with a simple brute force algorithm but unlimited computing power. It would win 100:0 against AZ. Would the grandmasters look at the games and say "Yes, it won every time but it's style is rather clumsy"?

grondilu 9y ago
There is no unlimited computing power anywhere, though. Not even in Google's quarters. The style difference is so profound that it is difficult to impute computing power only, because we know what kind of improvement reasonable computing power gives : it makes the engine stronger but does not quite change its style.
joefkelley 9y ago
Hard to say, since we don't know what such perfect play would look like. But I expect it would look quite boring, yes. It's important to state, though, that calling an engine's play "romantic" is not a value judgement. Stockfish and other engines play in a way that give a clear concrete advantage after X moves, whereas AlphaZero relatively prefers move that are "creative" or "beautiful" in the sense that there's less of a clear definite benefit, but instead some sort of slight positional advantage or more attacking chances or something similar. It's harder to prove that it was a good move, but it just "feels" good. In that sense humans enjoy it either since it's surprising, or maybe closer to how we're able to think. As an example, there is one game I saw analyzed where AlphaZero gradually gives up more and more material with little clear compensation, but gradually its position gets better and better, until Stockfish is completely out of good moves. It then turns the corner, snatches up more material than it gave up, and converts into a winning end-game. Such imbalanced style of play is much more interesting to watch than previous computer slogs of slowly jockying for slight advantages until one side can grab a pawn without giving up much and build into a win from there.