AlphaZero versus Stockfish

[bigbadwolf]

Bye-bye, Minimax and Alpha Beta pruning and hello, reinforcement learning.

Stockfish, which for most top players is their go-to preparation tool, and which won the 2016 TCEC Championship and the 2017 Chess.com Computer Chess Championship, didn't stand a chance. AlphaZero won the closed-door, 100-game match with 28 wins, 72 draws, and zero losses.

Google's AlphaZero Destroys Stockfish In 100-Game Match - Chess.com

 

[bigbadwolf]

In this paper, we apply a similar but fully generic algorithm, which we call AlphaZero, to the games of chess and shogi as well as Go, without any additional domain knowledge except the rules of the game, demonstrating that a general-purpose reinforcement learning algorithm can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance across many challenging domains.

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1712.01815.pdf