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Comment by thom | Hacker News Reader

And then what happened is AlphaZero changed the professional game in various interesting ways, and all its ideas were absorbed into Stockfish. A little bombast is forgivable for technology that goes on to have a big impact, and I don’t doubt it’s the same story here.

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> all its ideas were absorbed into Stockfish

don't think that is true, Stockfish incorporated NNUE techniques through a fork https://www.chess.com/news/view/stockfishnnue-strongest-ches...

being transparent with the setup of your invention is always a good thing.

>all its ideas were absorbed into Stockfish

That's not true at all, Stockfish still uses only human heuristics for search and NNUE for eval, a completely different architecture than alphazero and derived from the Yu Nasu Shogi engine.

It's a neural network trained on self-play games (many of them lifted from Leela Zero). I get that it's a different shape of network, but people really seem touchy about crediting Google with the kick up the bum that led us here. AlphaZero had a massive effect on chess globally, whatever people think about its press releases. My main point is that people should update the heuristic that wastes energy arguing about bold claims when clearly something amazing has happened that everyone in the industry will react to and learn from.

I don't have any particular thoughts about DeepMind's board game algorithms or how they were advertised, but even if I happened to think it was the most innovative and influential research in years, I'd still ask for honest communication about the work. It's part of being a healthy research community - although clearly the AI community falls well short on this, and nobody could say it's only DeepMind's fault.

>It's a neural network trained on self-play games

It's not, it's just supervised learning on evaluations. There is no self-play involved when training the model.

Where do the evaluations come from? The idea that Stockfish isn't benefiting hugely from Google having created and advertised AlphaZero is preposterous, can we please just stop?

>Where do the evaluations come from?

Good datasets are selected empirically, they are usually a mix of different sources, not a single engine.

>The idea that Stockfish isn't benefiting hugely from Google having created and advertised AlphaZero is preposterous, can we please just stop?

I have not said anything about AlphaZero, I am just reporting where you are wrong. Your arguments are simply not very convincing.

Okay, well, no sale I guess. Stockfish's training dataset is mostly self-play games from an engine directly inspired by AlphaZero. It moved to neural network evaluation after a fork based on a paper that cites AlphaZero. It plays chess more like AlphaZero than Stockfish 11. Yes, it's extremely interesting that it continues to edge out Leela with a fast, rough approximation of the latter's evaluation but much faster search. But it (and human chess) wouldn't be where it is today without AlphaZero, and I was originally responding to someone dismissing it based on the perceived over-zealousness of its marketing, as people seem to want to do with TFA. I merely submit that both of these Google innovations are exciting and impactful, and we should forgive their presentation, which nevertheless has been kind enough to link to the original papers which have all the information we need to help change the world.

> someone dismissing it based on the perceived over-zealousness of its marketing, as people seem to want to do with TFA

Sorry, but that's nothing but a reading comprehension problem for you

A lot of that going around. Have a great weekend.

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