How come “Deep Mind Alpha Zero” beats Stockfish...

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Avatar of TuckerTommy
Alpha Zero learned chess in 4 hours, no prior knowledge of the game....yet never loses games to Stockfish, only draws or wins!
Avatar of TameLava

Because technology is amazing... Also because Alpha Zero was creating it's own opening book as it went along, while Stockfish was not able too, and the time controls were weird, and Alpha Zero was running on a supercomputer and Stockfish was essentially running on a laptop... (hardware V.S. software)

Avatar of TuckerTommy
What does this say for the future of chess?
Avatar of Martin_Stahl
TameLava wrote:

...and Alpha Zero was running on a supercomputer and Stockfish was essentially running on a laptop... (hardware V.S. software)

 

64 threads isn't a laptop and it was able to search 70 million positions per second. The hash size may have been better at a different value and Stockfish didn't have an opening book for the main 100 games. Other than the TPUs for AlpahZero, I didn't see any processing information, though based on what I've read, the compute is done by the TPUs and it only looked at 80,000 positions per second.

 

When they started the games from given openings, Stockfish was able to score some wins, so an opening book certainly was part of the weakness there. I don't think overall processing (CPU) was at all a problem.