V. Reinhart wrote on Fri, Dec 15, 2017 05:16 PM UTC:
As for AlphaZero (AZ) playing chess against humans this much is pretty clear:
Stockfish >> human
AZ >> Stockfish
So obviously:
AZ >> human
("Stockfish" denotes the chess engine supported by a typical desktop CPU. Its performance against AZ with stronger hardware has not been tested)
Two comments I have about AZ:
1) AZ (currently) requires supercomputer-equivalent support (application-specific devices its developers call TPUs or "tensor processing units").
2) AZ and its related programs have also become very good at playing Shogi and Go. I don't see any reason why it could not master every chess variant I've ever seen. It's just the time (programming of the rules), and the required hardware that would deter its developers from doing this. There is certainly many other things for neural networks to be studying, so i don't anticipate AZ will "invade" the chess variant world.
As for AlphaZero (AZ) playing chess against humans this much is pretty clear:
Stockfish >> human
AZ >> Stockfish
So obviously:
AZ >> human
("Stockfish" denotes the chess engine supported by a typical desktop CPU. Its performance against AZ with stronger hardware has not been tested)
Two comments I have about AZ:
1) AZ (currently) requires supercomputer-equivalent support (application-specific devices its developers call TPUs or "tensor processing units").
2) AZ and its related programs have also become very good at playing Shogi and Go. I don't see any reason why it could not master every chess variant I've ever seen. It's just the time (programming of the rules), and the required hardware that would deter its developers from doing this. There is certainly many other things for neural networks to be studying, so i don't anticipate AZ will "invade" the chess variant world.