Pre-programmed with only the basic rules of chess, and using general (non-specific) self-training algorithm, AlphaZero trained itself to play chess over the course of nine hours and 44 million self-play games. Each move and each decision are the result of precise mathematical calculations, and human users can extract exact numerical evaluations for any given position.ĪlphaZero is different, as Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan lucidly explain in their new book, Game Changer: AlphaZero’s Groundbreaking Chess Strategies and the Promise of AI. Stockfish uses human-tuned criteria to evaluate each position in its search tree, and through “alpha-beta” search methods it is able to focus on promising continuations while pruning away inferior moves. The principles governing Stockfish’s play are not fundamentally different than those guiding Deep Blue, although they have been profoundly refined in the intervening years. In doing so it forced us to rethink everything we know about computer chess.
AlphaZero, a program created by a Google subsidiary known as DeepMind, trounced Stockfish in head-to-head play. Its title, “Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm,” was anodyne enough, but the paper announced a seismic shift in artificial intelligence and chess. So imagine the shock when a scientific pre-print appeared on the Internet in December 2017. They give the illusion of prescience, allowing amateurs the heady feeling that they know more than the players themselves. Sure, humans have given up trying to beat Stockfish or Komodo, even at odds, but our ‘metal friends’ (Tukmakov’s delightful turn of phrase) are now our trusted analytical partners and teachers.įar from killing our game, chess in the e-sport era now depends on the presence of engines, which play the role of the hole-cam in the poker boom. What was imagined as an antagonistic relationship between man and machine has instead proven to be a constructive one. Deep Blue’s victory was portrayed in the mass media as a referendum on human intelligence, a ‘canary in the coalmine’ moment in which the inevitable overtaking of human creativity by machine intelligence was made manifest.Ĭurious thing, though. To these three psychic wounds chess players can add a fourth: Garry Kasparov’s defeat at the hands of Deep Blue in 1997. And Freud himself landed the final, psychological blow, exposing the irrational unconscious forces beneath even the greatest achievements of human rationality. Darwin’s biological blow denied us the comfort of our separation from, and superiority over, the animal kingdom. The cosmological blow, struck by Copernicus, expelled us from our supposed place at the center of the universe. Sigmund Freud once described the “three severe blows” suffered by human narcissism in the course of Western history.
Game Changer: AlphaZero’s Groundbreaking Chess Strategies and the Promise of AI. My thanks to the good folks at Chess Life for allowing me to do so. Minor differences exist between this and the printed version. A penultimate (and unedited) version of the review is reproduced here.
This review has been printed in the April 2019 issue of Chess Life.
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