The strength of the language I used was motivated largely by the obviously bad-faith approach employed when they _first_ announced AlphaZero a year ago. They wa

The strength of the language I used was motivated largely by the obviously bad-faith approach employed when they _first_ announced AlphaZero a year ago. They wanted to be able to say they'd created the strongest engine in the world, and they created an environment where it was hard to fail. I will admit the setup used in this paper seems more reasonable on that basis. That said, I've checked out a few old versions of Stockfish (including the exact commit they used) and analysed the games in Table S6 in the paper. Stockfish still spots multiple blunders in its own play. Obviously these things aren't entirely deterministic, but it seems unlikely there was time trouble. And again, just to be clear, there's little doubt in my mind that AlphaZero's evaluation of any given position is better than Stockfish's or anyone else's. I'm not even saying it can't reliably beat Stockfish. I just find it sad that the evidence of its overall strength continues to be wobbly.