Comment by madisfun | Hacker News Reader

Comment by madisfun | Hacker News Reader

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It would be nice if A0 participated in at least one public computer chess championship, Chess.com's CCC or TCEC. That's a level playing field and all games published.

AlphaZero was a great concept and execution, but if we have to judge its relative strength, it should compete fairly. 4 TPUs (~ 4 Titan V) + 44 cores for AlphaZero vs only 44 cores for Stockfish pre-9 may or may not have put Stockfish at a disadvantage.

BTW, current, presumably balanced, TCEC 14 configurations are:

Non-GPU Server: CPUs: 2 x Intel Xeon E5 2699 v4 @ 2.8 GHz, Cores: 44 physical, RAM: 64 GB DDR4 ECC

GPU Server: GPUs: 1 x 2080 ti + 1 x 2080, CPU: Quad Core i5 2600k, RAM: 16GB DDR3-2133

TCEC GPU server looks more modest than what A0 authors used to "beat" SF.

The TCEC GPU overheated during the games, without anyone knowing until later. Then they underclocked it dramatically, as there was poor to no cooling in the datacenter they rented it from.

That reason alone, if I were Deepmind, I would not be included in those competitions. It would be horrible press for them, that would involve a ton of human error out of their control.

I believe it was TCEC season 13 which put GPU engines in disadvantage due to overheating, it was also the first season with GPUs. Right now there is TCEC season 14 in progress, did I miss anything?

They also beat it with only 1/10th the time that stockfish got. That should more or less negate any advantage of the extra processing power.

On paper, the results are amazing, but researchers are always biased to produce positive results.

BTW, a match between StockFish 10 and LeelaChessZero, an open source implementation of the same idea, will be organized in a couple of days. From the LC0 blog:

Lichess.org will host a match between the mighty Stockfish 10 and Leela. It will be a 6 games match with time control of 5'+2" with ChessNetwork commentary. Games will be played on 15th December at 17:00 UTC.

Stockfish 10 will run on 64 cores 2.3GHz Xeon, while Leela will use the latest v19.1 Lc0 with 11248 network and will run on one GTX 1080 Ti + one RTX 2080 GPU.

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