Human chess grandmaster Peter Heine Nielsen tells the BBC that he’s “always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on earth and showed us how they played chess.”
Well, move aside, ugly, giant bags of mostly water: now we know, because Google’s “superhuman” AlphaZero artificial intelligence (AI) taught itself chess from scratch in four hours. Then, it wiped the floor with the former world-leading chess software, Stockfish 8.
AlphaZero is actually a game-playing AI created by its Google sibling, DeepMind. DeepMind Technologies Ltd., a Google subsidiary, created a neural network that learns how to play video games in a fashion similar to that of humans.
That neural network had to learn how to play chess – without human interaction, mind you – because until recently it was a Go specialist that had confined itself to going around beating the world’s best Go players in its incarnation as AlphaGo.
Now that AlphaZero has been generalized, it can learn other games. After learning the rules to chess in four hours, it took on a 100-game match with Stockfish 8, which is an open-source chess engine that consistently ranks first or near the top of most chess-engine rating lists.
In the AlphaZero/Stockfish 8 games, AlphaZero won or drew all 100 games, according to a non-peer-reviewed research paper published by the DeepMind crew with Cornell University Library’s arXiv. It garnered 28 wins, 72 draws, and zero losses.
From the paper, whose authors include DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis: a child chess prodigy who reached the rank of chess master at the age of 13:
Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov told Chess.com that AlphaZero’s performance is “remarkable”:
According to Chess.com, AlphaZero is like humans in that it searches far fewer positions than its predecessors. The paper claims that it looks at “only” 80,000 positions per second, compared to Stockfish’s 70 million per second.
In fact, the DeepMind programmers used a specific type of machine learning – reinforcement learning – to train AlphaZero. From Chess.com’s writeup:
Not all grandmasters are fully satisfied with the way the match was set up. They’re debating the processing power of the two adversarial systems, while American GM Hikaru Nakamura reportedly called the match “dishonest”, pointing out that Stockfish’s methodology requires it to have an openings book for optimal performance. Another expert, GM Larry Kaufman, said he wants to see how AlphaZero would do on a home machine, as opposed to Google’s souped-up computers.
But aside from arguments about the fairness of the match, experts say that we’re looking at actual AI at this point. From here, we could see much more than chess wins. Chess.com quotes GM Peter Heine Nielsen:
Well, move aside, ugly, giant bags of mostly water: now we know, because Google’s “superhuman” AlphaZero artificial intelligence (AI) taught itself chess from scratch in four hours. Then, it wiped the floor with the former world-leading chess software, Stockfish 8.
AlphaZero is actually a game-playing AI created by its Google sibling, DeepMind. DeepMind Technologies Ltd., a Google subsidiary, created a neural network that learns how to play video games in a fashion similar to that of humans.
That neural network had to learn how to play chess – without human interaction, mind you – because until recently it was a Go specialist that had confined itself to going around beating the world’s best Go players in its incarnation as AlphaGo.
Now that AlphaZero has been generalized, it can learn other games. After learning the rules to chess in four hours, it took on a 100-game match with Stockfish 8, which is an open-source chess engine that consistently ranks first or near the top of most chess-engine rating lists.
In the AlphaZero/Stockfish 8 games, AlphaZero won or drew all 100 games, according to a non-peer-reviewed research paper published by the DeepMind crew with Cornell University Library’s arXiv. It garnered 28 wins, 72 draws, and zero losses.
From the paper, whose authors include DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis: a child chess prodigy who reached the rank of chess master at the age of 13:
Former world chess champion Garry Kasparov told Chess.com that AlphaZero’s performance is “remarkable”:
According to Chess.com, AlphaZero is like humans in that it searches far fewer positions than its predecessors. The paper claims that it looks at “only” 80,000 positions per second, compared to Stockfish’s 70 million per second.
In fact, the DeepMind programmers used a specific type of machine learning – reinforcement learning – to train AlphaZero. From Chess.com’s writeup:
But aside from arguments about the fairness of the match, experts say that we’re looking at actual AI at this point. From here, we could see much more than chess wins. Chess.com quotes GM Peter Heine Nielsen:
