AlphaZero: Will People Treat Chess the Way they Treat Tic-Tac-Toe?

#120
Children no longer do arithmetic: they use a pocket calculator.
Mental arithmetic competitions used to be popular, not so any more.

uh

In india we aren't allowed the use of a calculator for school/other exams till college

That's fantastic!  No wonder Indians are so good at math, engineering, and the hard sciences.

when 3x3 tic tac toe died, people iinvented 4x4 and 5x5

same with chess. even if it died(it probably will not) there will be variants and 4 player ones.

Someone must have invented those. Most just ignored the game!

More than 2-player games are an entirely different thing to 2 player games (for clarity, 2 teams counts as two players -  I mean 3 or more independent teams or players). The possibility of effective alliances makes them not a pure competition.  They are however much more accurate models for most of the real world.

What about ultimate tic-tac toe?

It wont dle, it has quadtrillions of variations

The only thing that died was this thread, 3 years ago. And now you resurrected it for absolutely no reason.

Alphazero is malicious. But that's mankind to blame on. Chess was killed since they invented chess engines. To me is alright to discover new paths, ways to aproach chess, but the artistic, beautiful and magic outcome ought to come from human work, not a computer. See, people think they are good and that it's their own merit only, but truth is, EVERYONE(or 98% players) do solve and study engine lines . So today's chess is more memory than both true artistic and calculation skills. Chess true magic was killed long ago, like I said, since the beginning of chess engines. Humans always find a way to destroy their most beautiful an valuable assets in order to make things easier. A very lame and lazy attitude. If it were on my hands, I'd destroy, ban and forbid any chess engine in any website. But I know, people will find a way to let a machine do their job, even if it's a game. Just look at the AI, soon we'll need no Graphic Designers, artists, even musicians... FFS. Ata boy, mankind is wrecked.

Aplhazero's playing style is so different... And very interesting. Probably my favourite

Not Leela? Alpha has the disadvantage that it has been defunct for years!

Think of it this way, athletics did not end when people invented cars.

Alphazero had the advantage that it was never publicly shown. The games attributed to AZ might have been real, or might have been made up, nobody can (and could) check that.

It was the most successful media hack in chess history, or maybe the second behind Kempelen's Turk (which was a fraud, but also an amazing feat of engineering).

Leela never crushed Stockfish in any match. They have met countless times. Most of the time Stockfish wins, and even when when Leela wins, it's a close thing. Looking at Leela just makes it more likely that AlphaZero was a fraud.

That doesn't make any sense. Why would you want to match a current engine with a 8-year old one? How would that prove anything?

Of course, engines get better over time. And Stockfish is always on top, in almost every competition, except in those extremely suspicious secret matches played against AlphaZero when Stocky got completely crushed. Nothing similar has happened ever since.

The Leela of today is a lot better than AZ was back in the day. Obviously. Engines get better over time.

It's extremely suspicious that a super powerful engine supposedly appears from nowhere, plays a secret match or two, and then disappears forever. The fact alone that the match was played in secret with absolutely no transparency is enough to raise the suspicion of anyone.

It's possible that they cheated with hardware. AZ was running on the Google supercomputer, while SF was running on a grandma's laptop.

It's also possible that the games were cherry-picked. They played 10 thousand games, and then the PR guys picked the 100 that was the most spectacular.

I usually don't believe everything that a company publishes in an advertisement. They may be telling the truth, but they have absolutely no reason to do so.

I have no idea why you are so fixated on Stockfish 8. It's an outdated version. So is 9, 10, 11 etc.

Leela now is not the same as Leela 5 years ago, or AZ either. You are twisting the facts just to prove something that can't be proven.

AZ is no more. It never ever played any fair match against any engine, where the whole world could see the setups and make sure that the match is indeed fair. Google had the chance to do it, but they choose not to.

The games were shown to a number of people for sure, including some GMs. Some writers also got access to games and wrote at least one book about that access.