
Show HN: AlphaZero Science paper - Inufu
https://deepmind.com/blog/alphazero-shedding-new-light-grand-games-chess-shogi-and-go/
======
gamegoblin
It's a shame they still played against 2016 Stockfish (Stockfish 8), when
Stockfish 9 or Stockfish Dev were available (Stockfish 10 is out now, but only
very recently, so I can understand why they didn't use it).

Their results show that they are only just barely stronger than Stockfish 8,
but Stockfish 9 and 10 are stronger than 8 as well.

EDIT: Also meant to include a shout-out to
[http://www.lczero.org/](http://www.lczero.org/) which is an open source
implementation of AlphaZero chess. Here is their forum post for this paper:
[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/lczero/TfmaNHI99gk](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/lczero/TfmaNHI99gk)

SECOND EDIT: I was wrong! They did play against a newer SF than 8,
specifically, SF at this commit: [https://github.com/official-
stockfish/Stockfish/commit/b508f...](https://github.com/official-
stockfish/Stockfish/commit/b508f9561cc2302c129efe8d60f201ff03ee72c8) , which
was about 2 weeks before SF 9 was released, so maybe it is close in strength
to SF 9.

~~~
plopz
It said it was winning games with 1:10-100 time control. Why would you say
thats only just barely stronger?

~~~
jeremysalwen
Time handicaps are supposed to correspond to handicaps in computational power.
But here according to the paper AlphaZero is running on ~100 teraFLOPS, but
the stockfish machine has about 1 teraFLOP (my best estimate based on
[https://www.microway.com/knowledge-center-
articles/detailed-...](https://www.microway.com/knowledge-center-
articles/detailed-specifications-of-the-intel-xeon-e5-2600v4-broadwell-ep-
processors/)). So 100:1 time control would be fair from a computational
perspective (of course comparing the computational power used is more subtle
than the rough calculation I did here).

~~~
FartyMcFarter
As far as I know, FLOPS are mostly meaningless for traditional chess engines.
They don't really use floating point operations much or at all.

~~~
jeremysalwen
I know, but it still gives you a rough measure of the amount of silicon used.

~~~
FartyMcFarter
I don't think so. For example, GPUs have way more TFLOPS per area than CPUs.

------
mindgam3
To OP or anyone else at DeepMind: can you comment on why you decided not to
release all of the games?

IMHO as a competitive scholastic chess player (former national U16 champion
and top 3 world U10) and software engineer, it would significantly increase
credibility of results. Not to mention would be fascinating to see the “ugly”
games in addition to the ones handpicked by your team.

~~~
ehsankia
They've released over a 100 new ones here now.

[https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/alphazero-
resources/](https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/alphazero-resources/)

~~~
mindgam3
That’s a step, but I still find it weird to release some but not all of the
games. I’m trying to come up with a logical reason other than they have
something they don’t want people to see in the rest of the data, but so far
I’m failing.

~~~
faceplanted
It doesn't necessarily come under "logical reasons", but the DeepMind team
have pretty strict rules on data retention, chances are there's a debate in
the company about it.

------
mcphage
> AlphaZero and AlphaGo Zero used a single machine with 4 first-generation
> TPUs and 44 CPU cores. A first generation TPU is roughly similar in
> inference speed to commodity hardware such as an NVIDIA Titan V GPU,
> although the architectures are not directly comparable.

> The amount of training the network needs depends on the style and complexity
> of the game, taking approximately 9 hours for chess, 12 hours for shogi, and
> 13 days for Go.

How much would that much computing power would cost on something like AWS?
That's a lot of hardware, but if you're only renting it for 9 hours... the
beefiest EC2+GPU instance Amazon has currently is p3.16xlarge, which has 8
Tesla V100 GPUs, and 64 (virtual) CPUs, for $25/hour on-demand. My
understanding is that a V100 is slightly more powerful than a Titan V, so does
that mean you could run the Chess training (at least the AlphaZero side) for
$225? That seems impossible?

EDIT: pacala below pointed out that the hardware listed was just for running
AlphaZero against Stockfish, not for training it. Digging through the preprint
itself, they say that for training they used:

> During training only, 5,000 first-generation tensor processing units (TPUs)
> (19) were used to generate self-play games, and 16 second-generation TPUs
> were used to train the neural networks.

So that would be... a lot more.

~~~
pacala
The most expensive part of training AlphaZero is creating the training dataset
by self-playing tens of millions of games.

~~~
mcphage
Ah! Okay, that's what I think I misunderstood. The 4 TPU + 44 GPU
configuration was only for _running AlphaZero against Stockfish_ , not for
training it. Phew! That seemed unbelievable, I was hoping someone would see
what I was missing.

And the 9 hours _was_ for training, but I don't think the article linked says
on what.

------
madisfun
It would be nice if A0 participated in at least one public computer chess
championship, Chess.com's CCC or TCEC. That's a level playing field and all
games published.

AlphaZero was a great concept and execution, but if we have to judge its
relative strength, it should compete fairly. 4 TPUs (~ 4 Titan V) + 44 cores
for AlphaZero vs only 44 cores for Stockfish pre-9 may or may not have put
Stockfish at a disadvantage.

BTW, current, presumably balanced, TCEC 14 configurations are:

Non-GPU Server: CPUs: 2 x Intel Xeon E5 2699 v4 @ 2.8 GHz, Cores: 44 physical,
RAM: 64 GB DDR4 ECC

GPU Server: GPUs: 1 x 2080 ti + 1 x 2080, CPU: Quad Core i5 2600k, RAM: 16GB
DDR3-2133

TCEC GPU server looks more modest than what A0 authors used to "beat" SF.

~~~
AndyNemmity
The TCEC GPU overheated during the games, without anyone knowing until later.
Then they underclocked it dramatically, as there was poor to no cooling in the
datacenter they rented it from.

That reason alone, if I were Deepmind, I would not be included in those
competitions. It would be horrible press for them, that would involve a ton of
human error out of their control.

~~~
madisfun
I believe it was TCEC season 13 which put GPU engines in disadvantage due to
overheating, it was also the first season with GPUs. Right now there is TCEC
season 14 in progress, did I miss anything?

------
RivieraKid
Finally! I've been waiting for this for a year. I love that it learned from
scratch without human bias and how it plays in a much more captivating style
than alpha-beta engines.

Will you be answering questions?

------
antirez
How it is possible that a so high profile article says a so doubtful
statement?

"Traditional chess engines – including the world computer chess champion
Stockfish and IBM’s ground-breaking Deep Blue – rely on thousands of rules and
heuristics handcrafted by strong human players that try to account for every
eventuality in a game."

~~~
judofyr
Looking at the recent patches[1] for Stockfish it seems like a rather true
statement? Most of the patches are related to how it evaluates a position; not
how it prunes/searches the tree of possible moves.

Here's one random test which showed improvement:
[https://github.com/Vizvezdenec/Stockfish/compare/5c2fbcd...5...](https://github.com/Vizvezdenec/Stockfish/compare/5c2fbcd...51e1b4b)

    
    
        Bitboard b1 = double_pawn_attacks_bb<Them>(nonPawnEnemies) & b & attackedBy[Us][PAWN];
        score += make_score(90, 72) * popcount(b1);
    

And look at all of the magic numbers and logic in evaluate.cpp:
[https://github.com/official-
stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/...](https://github.com/official-
stockfish/Stockfish/blob/master/src/evaluate.cpp)

[1]:
[http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests](http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests)

~~~
antirez
Position evaluation is very unlike to the article statement, where it looks
like _actual_ game dynamics are taken into account one after the other in
order to make the engine stronger. Instead still traditional engines _mostly_
rely on brute force. So a reader not aware of those things will have a wrong
picture in her/his mind.

------
stabbles
So they finally released more games?! Really looking forward to Kingscrusher
or Chessnetwork covering more of these 210 games on YouTube:
[https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/alphazero-
resources/](https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/alphazero-resources/)

~~~
conistonwater
Daniel King is doing them now
([https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFtY7gNRVRI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFtY7gNRVRI)),
and so is Matthew Sadler for Chess24
([https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAwlxGCJB4NchyTBYik8F...](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAwlxGCJB4NchyTBYik8FBbnzLXpCCO79)).

------
schaefer
Inufu,

As a Go player, is there any way I could download and review the game records
described in this paper?

~~~
gwern
[https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/alphazero-
resources/](https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/alphazero-resources/)

~~~
schaefer
I appreciate the link, but there doesn't appear to be a single Go game record
at this link.

Where as the paper describes a thousand (or more) games played between Alpha
Go Zero and AlphaZero.

~~~
gwern
My point was that that is the official source for all the games they released
so you can see for yourself. If they aren't there, they aren't there. You can
download the earlier games ([http://www.alphago-
games.com/](http://www.alphago-games.com/)) but apparently not these new ones.

~~~
schaefer
> "If they aren't there, they aren't there"

That's why I've specifically asked the author. Perhaps if Inufu sees there's
interest, more game records could be released.

~~~
gwern
If you've been following the past DM releases, you'd know they pretty much
never release additional material when asked and it's pointless asking a
junior employee (who hasn't answered any questions to begin with). WYSIWYG.

~~~
schaefer
I have studied the previously released games. they are pretty enough to ask.

Even if (and here I agree with you) chances seem slim.

------
Rampoina
What is Deepmind's interest in not releasing the source code and weights for
the neural networks?

I'm excited about their work but it seems that it would be much better for
everyone if they just released their work openly.

------
kevinwang
Dunno if I just missed it in the paper, but is there an explanation for why
alphazero is better at go than alphago zero?

------
detaro
I don't see anything I can try out?
[https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/showhn.html)

~~~
gus_massa
From the profile, it looks that it may be one of the authors. In that case
this can be more like a AMA than a ShowHN.

~~~
sctb
Maybe a little borderline, but it seems like there are lots of resources to
read and game data to play with, so we can probably spring for a “Show HN” in
this case.

------
YetAnotherNick
Why Show HN? It generally implies a single person or just a few people behind
it.

~~~
fargo
Looks like the author works on the project

~~~
kzrdude
If they don't show up in the comment section they might as well not pretend to
be part of the community.

------
thom
Another set of games against an outdated Stockfish which appears to make moves
that a recent Stockfish at any reasonably depth disagrees with. I've no doubt
at all that AlphaZero has a much stronger evaluation algorithm than Stockfish,
but I do wish they'd be a bit more transparent about its actual strength
(although presumably they're selling access to it right now if you connect all
the dots).

~~~
why_only_15
Why would they be selling access to it? No one actually cares about computer
chess other than in the chess world. It's a hobby.

~~~
tephra
Computer chess is a huge part of modern professional chess, someone like
Magnus Carlsen would probably pay for access to the best chess engine
available.

------
nuguy
It is my moral obligation to express to you the fact that AI, even this kind
of AI, is a death sentence for humanity. The progress of automation will
eventually meet and surpass the human mind. But even before it does, perhaps
long before it does, it will cause massive economic disruption and
unemployment. The more complete automation becomes, the less power humans will
have, the less influence humans will have over the powerful entities that hold
the keys to critical resources such as jobs. The economics of automation leave
little doubt that the outcome will be bad for humans. I’m sorry I can’t
explain it more effectively here. But I think it’s clear to anyone who thinks
it through carefully.

Please stop applying your intillenge to AI.

Edit: substantive counter-arguments would be _highly_ appreciated

~~~
ajnin
The current economic model is by no means a rule of nature that humans need to
follow unless they disappear. That model gives power into the hands of the
minority that possesses the most capital (as machines or money to buy
machines), up until now that capital has needed workers to create useful
stuff, I agree with you that automation is causing that less and less workers
are needed to create value, causing a widening of the inequality gap.

The solution to that problem is not to stop working on AI, it is to rethink
how capital and power is shared among the society. Indeed advanced AI and
automation may well be our way out of the exploitation of man by man.

~~~
nuguy
You completely misinterpret what I’ve said. The way capital and power are
shared is determined by economics. Not by us. The presence of AI will cause
capital and power and etc to naturally shift away from humans in general. It
is inescapable.

