Skynet is Upon Us

I don't know if this was covered since I don't check this board much, but in December Google released an academic paper on their new "Deep Mind" AI project called Alpha Zero.

An earlier version of Alpha had already beaten the world "Go" champion last year, but now they wanted to make it learn chess. If you know anything about chess, you know that computers have been beating the best players since the 90's. Garry Kasporov (top 5 player of all time) was defeated by IBM's Deep Blue supercomputer back in 1997 (which made world wide news). Since that time chess engines have gotten good enough where they can beat the best grandmasters running on nothing more than an iPhone.

Well Google didn't program Alpha to be a chess engine. With Chess engines, you typically have human input. You teach it how much to value pieces. You teach it opening theory (engines have huge opening book databases) and you give it end game databases. Chess engines are essentially "brute force" calculators that humans teach. Humans design them to value this or that piece or to calculate this or that position in some way. While they are incredibly good at chess, they have no real "intelligence."

All Google did was teach Alpha the rules of chess. They did nothing else. Google gave it no input whatsoever on chess theory.

They then said "go play" and Alpha began playing chess against itself. As it played it taught itself what was good play and what wasn't so good. They let it play itself only for 4 hours before putting it to the test.

They then took the best traditional chess engine (Stockfish) and had it play a 100 game match against Alpha. Stockfish is incredibly strong - crushing any and all humans. Keep in mind that the best human chess rating ever achieved was 2880 (obtained by Carlsen). Stockfish is rated about 3400.

Well guess what? Alpha crushed Stockfish. Alpha beat it 28 times out of 100 matches (rest were draws). Stockfish did not win a single game!

That is a stunning result. Such dominance is rarely seen. For instance, the best human (Carlsen) would not beat another top player (like Annand) 28 out of 100 with zero losses. Beating Stockfish 28 times is insane. Alpha even won a few games as black (which is much harder than winning as white).

But it's better. Alpha completely bamboozled Stockfish to the point it was funny (and brilliant). He even got Stockfish into a Zugzwang (it's a chess position where the opponent is totally boxed in and any possible moves are losing moves).

If you want to watch that "Zugzwang" match, this Russian guy on Youtube replayed it and gave a good analysis of it: LINK