Comment by bluecalm

8 hours ago

Yeah chess is a good example. DeepMind came for publicity with AlphaZero. Arranged a match with Stockfish with rigged rules to make AlphaZero look better than it really was (it was amazing but the match wasn't fair) and then just published some games and went home.

I was bitter about that back in the day as I hoped for more answers, more matches, more "truth" about chess being shown. Soon after that community project Leela Chess Zero was started and not only surpassed original AlphaZero but added few hundred ELO points over it. Then the combination of NN and classical engines happened with NNUE and current Stockfish is again a few hundred ELO points stronger.

Today we pretty much know the truth in chess for all practical purposes. Human analysts/preparation experts focus on finding interesting path and opponent profiling (what is the most unpleasant for the opponent to face). They don't look for truth anymore. The game is doing great, it's more popular than it ever was.

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bluecalm

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squidbeak  6 hours ago

Why don't you mention the second match here, with its adjustments to meet Stockfish's quibbles - and the same result?

https://en.chessbase.com/post/the-full-alphazero-paper-is-pu...

  • bluecalm  5 hours ago

    Stockfish and other classical engines were never intended to be run in matches without opening books (of which there were plenty). Development assumed the presence of opening book and authors made 0 effort to make engines play well in openings because of it. This is also the reason classical Stockfish was a very small binary. A little effort to make it even by including even a very small opening book (like 50MB or something that would result in still smaller binary than NN engine with its net) would make it much more interesting.

    The result was that Stockfish lost many games by walking into known bad lines and lost way more games than it otherwise would.