It's available free
here (and on Medium).
Dubious takes overall imo. His stuff about chess players is weird:
Quote:
In chess circles, AlphaZero has been compared to Paul Morphy, an American chess prodigy from the 19th century, when a more swashbuckling style of play was in vogue.
I have heard nobody make this ludicrous comparison until now.
Quote:
Schaeffer also draws a comparison with Tigran Petrosian, a Soviet champion from the 1960s who played an attack-on-all-fronts game: “He was like a python — he would slowly squeeze you.”
Bolded is an exactly backwards description of Petrosian, who was a defensive player. From the first paragraph of his Wikipedia article:
Quote:
He was nicknamed "Iron Tigran" due to his almost impenetrable defensive playing style, which emphasised safety above all else.
Schaeffer's description is accurate, but was misunderstood by the author. If chess were MMA, Petrosian would be one of those boring BJJ guys who avoid striking and get booed by the crowd.
I don't think the author understands the impressive thing about AlphaZero. Here's the bishop sacrifice he's talking about in the article.
Here AlphaZero as White found the extremely strong Bg5!!. The immediate threat is Nf6, where if gxf6, Bxf6+ is terminal, and if instead after Nf6 the queen runs to c2 or d3, Bd4 taking over the diagonal and Black is getting slaughtered. The refutations of the various tries are complicated, but it turns out Black has no way to cope with this threat.
Thing is though, Stockfish does eventually find this move. It takes a while - hours on a standard computer - but AlphaZero had a ton of processing power behind it. So finding Bg5 is impressive but not in itself evidence of superiority over Stockfish.
What's impressive is, well, look at the position. White is two pawns down but Black's position looks awful to human eyes. The a8 rook and b8 knight are without any legal moves. The queen is jammed in the corner. This is typical of AlphaZero's games. Stockfish allows one minor concession after another as it sees no concrete refutation, and AlphaZero gradually improves its position until it drops these horrendous positional binds on Stockfish. The point isn't the killing blow here, it's having a position where these killing blows are available. As Schaeffer put it: "[AlphaZero has] such control over the board, it’s almost as though it has an intuition something good will happen". It's this sort of deep understanding of how positions work - as opposed to tactical death blows - which sets AlphaZero apart from standard engines.
Last edited by ChrisV; 01-14-2018 at 01:31 AM.