I'm rather illiterate on the subject of computers, but I do know in the 1950s, developers were hoping that chess could be the construct for understanding AI, and visionaries such as Mikhail Botvinnik, saw computers learning to play chess like humans, only better. But rather quickly number crunching became the way to go and AI development -in relation to chess at least - fell by the wayside. Pure calculation did however prove to be impossibly strong especially as computers themselves also became faster along with improved algorithms and better elvaluations.
Is this so-called AlphaZero a sort of vindication of the early computer-chess ideas?
As someone who has quite a few years knowledge and experience of this area (at least the parts of it known as "machine learning") I would say yes, you are right, the success of AlphaZero is a vindication of the idea that artificial intelligence is capable of achieving entities that can do amazing things (better than conventional computer programs). Deep Blue (and its offspring Deeper Blue) was not an AI: it was a traditional computer system where humans put in the intelligence and the computer did the hard work, plus some specialised hardware to make it run faster. Conventional chess engines have a tree search algorithm and a positional evaluation function and the program is designed to efficiently implement what those algorithms say. Deep Blue incorporated the wisdom of professional chessplayers in its evaluation function, and used custom ASICs designed for running chess code: that is what made it better than other programs of the time (but a long way short of the best PC-based programs of today).
By contrast AlphaZero uses a form of artificial intelligence called reinforcement learning. which basically involves playing chess in order to learn very efficiently from experience to play chess better and better.
It does have algorithms in it corresponding to the tree search and positional evaluation, but it writes them itself based on experience and keeps on tweaking them as it plays.
One clever trick is called bootstrapping. Suppose an AI evaluates a position and works out the best move and a few moves later with the apparent best moves played the evaluation is different . This happens quite often even in games between top engines: it is a necessary part of how games get won!
Without the game having ended, the AI now has reason to believe that for reasons of consistency its evaluation function is not quite right, so it adjusts it with a little nudge that would have made the earlier evaluation more similar to the later one. The useful thing is that because the evaluation routine is general, it will now tend to evaluate other positions that are somewhat similar a little differently too (and the hope - and empirically the truth - is that that will make it play better). This process repeated for a few tens of millions of moves (in 600,000 games if I recall) was sufficient to produce what may well be the strongest chess player ever.
SP, my comment about chess not being dead was a direct response to your post #42.
I'm reading comments by GMs on Facebook saying that this is a great day for chess because of how much AlphaZero could teach us about the game!
For every Eeyore shaped cloud, there's a silver lining.
Look how FM Mike Klein opened up his essay: "Chess changed forever today."
Then a commenter just posted this: "Most comments treat the DeepMind machine as an engine. That is entirely wrong. There is no chess engine at all. There is an AI algorithm which trained himself for 9 hours, starting from bare chess rules. Leave it to train for 100 days, and you might expect something much more powerful. Admittedly, after some time, it would refine its evaluations to an extent that further training would not improve him at all."
Wowwwww. Triple Exclam. It's what I thought back in '97 or so when Deep Blue beat WC Garry Kasparov. The brute number crunching will just get faster and deeper.
Now we have a self-trained AI algorithm where the programmers can either improve the algorithm continuously or have the algorithm go much longer.
Yowsa! AlphaZero's chess strength will be "God-Like".
But AlphaZero will not turn into a sentient life-form. Thank goodness!