Is there something special about these chess engines that makes SPSA more desirable for these use cases specifically? My intuition is that something like Bayesian optimization could yield stronger optimization results, and that the computational overhead of doing BO would be minimal compared to the time it takes to train and evaluate the models.
Statisticians and operations researchers have spent a hundred years deciding how to do as few experiments as possible to tweak parameters in the ways that give the highest impact with statistical basis that the selections are good.
In the language of information and decision trees, these experiments are trying to in some sense “branch” on the entropy minimizing variables.
https://github.com/official-stockfish/fishtest/wiki/Fishtest...
There's simply a lot of sample efficiency to gain by adapting the experiment to incoming data in a regime where one can repeatedly design n candidates, observe their effects, and repeat m times compared to a setting where one must design a fixed experiment with n*m samples.
Or, if attempting to use SPSA to say, perform a final post-training tune to the last layers of a neural network, this could be thousands of parameters or more.
That being said, it still seems possible to be that using a different black box optimization technique for a fairly constrained set of related magic numbers (say, fewer than 50) might lead to some real performance improvements in these systems, could be worth reaching out to the lc0 or stockfish development communities.
Serial killers get fan mail, that’s true now and it was true 100 years ago.
blog post is good
The video is probably the least bizarre thing there, if that's what you are warning about.
Feds this guy right here ^^
Thanks for the warnings, kind strangers.
One of my formative early internet experiences was loading up a video of a man being beheaded with a knife.
Luckily, I realized what was about to happen, and didn't subject myself to the whole thing.
Although, setting any kind of hair on fire in public should be punishable, primarily because of stench of the burnt hairs.
The idea of something being "defiantly" NSFW gave me a chuckle.
Response from the author of Viridithas, there is a link to this engine in her webpage.
Chess engines have been impossible for humans to beat for well over a decade.
But a position in chess being solved is a specific thing, which is still very far from having happened for the starting position. Chess has been solved up to 7 pieces. Solving basically amounts to some absolutely massive tables that have every variation accounted for, so that you know whether a given position will end in a draw, black win or white win. (https://syzygy-tables.info)
I haven't verified OP's claim attributed to 'someone on the Stockfish discord', but if true, that's fascinating. There would be nothing left for the engine developers to do but improve efficiency and perhaps increase the win-to-draw ratio.
And the play style of Alpha Zero wasn't different in a way that needs a super trained chess intuition to see, it's outrageously different if you take a look at the games.
I guess my point is, that even if the current situation is basically a 'deadlock', it's been proven that it's not some sort of eternal knowledge of the game as of yet. There's still the possiblity that a new type of approach could blow the current top engines out of the water, with a completely different take on the game.
IMO AlphaZero was partially a result of the fact that using more compute also works. Stockfish 10 running on 4x as many CPUs would beat Stockfish 8 by a larger margin than AlphaZero did. To this day, nobody has determined what a "fair" GPU to CPU comparison is.
War was "solved" when someone made a weapon capable of killing all the enemy soldiers, until someone made a weapon capable of disabling the first weapon.
But I'm not sure whether that guy was guessing or confident about that claim.
In that hypothetical of running 2 instances of Stockfish against one another on a modern laptop, with the key difference being minutes of compute time, it'd probably be very close to 100% of draws. Depending on how many games you run. So, if you run a million games, there's probably some outliers. If you run a hundred, maybe not.
When it comes to actually solved positions, the 7-piece tables take around 1TB of RAM to even run. These tablebases are used by Stockfish when you actually want to run it at peak strength. [3]
[0]: https://tcec-chess.com [1]: https://lichess.org/broadcast/tcec-s28-leagues--superfinal/m... [2]: https://lczero.org [3]: https://github.com/syzygy1/tb
I remember hearing that starting position is so draw-ish that it's not practical anymore
Chess is a 2 player game of perfect, finite information, so by Zermelo's theorem either one side always wins with optimal play or it's a draw with optimal play. The argument from the Discord person simply says that Stockfish computationally can't come up with a way to beat itself. Whether this is true (and it really sounds like a question about depth in search) is separate from whether the game itself is solved, and it very much is not.
Solving chess would be a table that simply lists out the optimal strategy at every node in the game tree. Since this is computationally infeasible, we will certainly never solve chess absent some as yet unknown advance in computation.
In the TCEC game, I see "2. f4?!", so I'm guessing Stockfish was forced to played some specific opening, i.e. it was forced to make a mistake.
For what it's worth, Stockfish wins the rematch also. https://tcec-chess.com/#game=13&round=fl&season=cup16
It's also almost certainly the case, in that I don't know why you would do it, that Stockfish given the black pieces and extensive pondering would be meaningfully better than Stockfish with a time capped move order. Most games are going to be draws so practically it would take awhile to determine this.
I'm of the view that the actual answer for chess is "It's a draw with optimal play."
A quick visit at the homepage suggests that it's probably the latter. I don't want to be rude, not posting out of malice, but if someone else was reading this and was trying to parse it, I think it might be helpful to compare notes and evaluate whether it's better to discard the article altogether.
The mass delusion of, "I don't understand what I'm reading, therefore it must be produced by an llm."
I think it's a pretty serious problem. Not that llm text exists on the internet, but that reasonable people are reflexively closed off to creativity because the mere existence of the possibility that something is created by an llm is in their minds grounds for disqualification.
A common property of llm psychosis is the development of an internal vocabulary that the llm learns, often reusing words but adopting specific meanings, for some reason quantum and quantic are very popular for this.