Really no thoughts on this?
Theory: Leela Zero was not trolling Chiron, but conserving resources to not have to calculate Stalem
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It's because you're anthropomorphizing the program to a hilarious degree. So it comes off as not only wrong, but also naive. She had artifical tablebase evaluation added in an incorrect manner.
So she knew the positions being reached were winning, but couldn't follow the shortest winning combination. It's a bug at best, and almost certainly decreases her strength compared to proper tablebase implementation. And could backfire in less obviously winning positions.
Going to copy and paste my own comment from this youtube video made by International Master Daniel Rensch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=1435&v=hoi_QnOdqj0
"Those queen sacs are exactly what I do in blitz chess because it's far simpler to wipe material off the board and mate with only the enemy king on the board. Leela is a neural network, not a brute force machine.
For instance, If it's Queen + 2 pawns vs Rook, I will quickly force my opponent to give up his rook for me queen, and then underpromote both my pawns to two rooks so I can quickly mate him without accidently stalemating.
In this game she purposely underpromotes to a rook and then a knight in case the enemy king doesn't capture. If she promoted to a queen and Chiron didn't recapture, there is increased complexity and thinking required to not stalemate Chiron by accident.
Overall, what I believe you witnessed was Leela making moves that most preserved her TIME and conserved her energy...something that I do all the time in chess. Having to calculate how NOT to stalemate your opponent takes MORE resources than not having to do the calculation to begin with.
Clearly when she had to make the final promotion, she realized it required the LEAST computational resources to achieve the mate with a queen, instead of a bishop (which only me and very few other people know how to do within 33 moves maximum) or a rook (if she underpromoted again to a rook, she would have had to calculate additional stalemate threats since queen/knight works better than rook/knight to deny different color squares).
AIso, if I'm playing a King + Pawn vs King, I always underpromote to a rook in blitz chess since there is no way to accidentally slip/blunder and stalemate, whereas I can accidentally stalement if a promote to a queen and move too quickly.
It's all about conserving brain power, which is what Leela appeared to be doing. (however, if I had a knight on the board, I would definitely choose a queen instead of a rook, unless I was planning to move my knight to the opposite corner of the board so as not to interfere with a king/rook mate).
So, if I really had to take an educated guess, Leela had plenty of self-taught games with a King+Queen vs King+nonqueen material, where she accidentally stalemated herself, and thus, by the virtue of her self-learning process, was trying to clean the board and underpromote to pieces she knows will easily win without the threat of stalemate."