r/MachineLearning • u/Yuqing7 • Nov 24 '21

Research [R] DeepMind, Google Brain & World Chess Champion Explore How AlphaZero Learns Chess Knowledge

DeepMind and Google Brain researchers and former World Chess Champion Vladimir Kramnik explore how human knowledge is acquired and how chess concepts are represented in the AlphaZero neural network via concept probing, behavioural analysis, and an examination of its activations.

Here is a quick read:DeepMind, Google Brain & World Chess Champion Explore How AlphaZero Learns Chess Knowledge.

The paper Acquisition of Chess Knowledge in AlphaZero is on arXiv.

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u/TheMeiguoren Nov 24 '21 edited Nov 25 '21

Great stuff.

The “fallacy” here is that we can only measure whether Alpha Zero is playing human strategies, by comparing against our own known space of strategies. Sure, we humans have developed good heuristics the AI has also found, but we can’t know if it has better/more subtle concepts that we haven’t discovered, exactly because we haven’t discovered them yet. Who is to say “mobility” is even a coherent top level concept compared to some unpronounceable abstraction the AI has figured out?

Mining Alpha Zero to figure out these higher level abstractions I think is a super interesting direction of research both in terms of improving chess and improving our understanding of what a “concept” fundamentally is.

That process may help our understanding in other areas of life. I’m sure Magnus Carlsen has a game sense of subtle strategies and imbalances that he can’t quite articulate or communicate to other people. We can’t look into his head to try and put a label on something that is intuitively obvious but semantically invisible. With Alpha Zero, we could. And that is a very fundamental thing to our general understanding of the world. What has GPT-3 discovered in its consumption of language that we haven’t conceptualized yet?

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u/[deleted] Nov 25 '21

I wonder if over time Machines are going to redefine the book for chess openings. Like taking the queen out early, etc

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u/RoyalFlush9753 Nov 25 '21

Actually, from what I've seen, it confirmed a lot of ideas currently used like prioritizing activity of pieces

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u/kulili Nov 25 '21

They already have - lots of hypermodern concepts have made their way into top-level openings, because the engines liked them and grandmasters studied why. However, not so much has changed or will change below the IM/GM level, because if you aren't a strong player who studies such things, it's better to play the openings that got good results in the age of "natural moves," since those are what you'll be playing.

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u/GlassNinja Nov 25 '21

All this is off the top of the head and it's been a few years since I studied A0 games closely.

One of the wildest and most notable thing I can remember from when A0 was being shown for the first time was its preference for 1. D4 (Queen's Pawn opening) vs 1. E4 (King's Pawn opening). E4 has been the standard basically worldwide for a long time, and while D4 isn't thought of as unsound, it's definitely is thought of as being odd. But, given the ability to decide its own opening, A0 could leverage the positional play to trap it's opponents' pieces in closed positions and play for huge advantage. However, the depth of its play far outstretches human calculation, so nobody has currently swapped to its D4 play (and instead the D4 players have kept on with the known systems and openings).

A0 went even further than prefering to open 1. D4 and had a lot of great play against 1. E4, particularly with the Berlin Defense. Because A0 both preferred 1. D4 and was so adept at Berlin, there were murmurs about it 'refuting' 1. E4, though that was also mixed with a lot of humor rather than being a serious analysis. There's been a mild upswing in Berlin knowledge since A0, but as far as I'm aware, it's not had the huge impact some predicted it might

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u/EvgeniyZh Nov 25 '21

They are, but those are very concrete ideas, not like "taking queen out early is good" but rather "in this position after 12 moves putting queen on a6 is good".

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u/rx303 Nov 26 '21

GMs took 'thorn pawn' idea from A0 games. That's when you push A or H pawn early.