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piker an hour ago

Question: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?

gwd an hour ago | parent | next [-]

My understanding is that AlphaZero only really existed for a year or two; there's no objective way to compare it at the moment.

Leela Zero tried to open-source that work, but Stockfish incorporated a number of improvements from AlphaZero, including a neural network and a different search method, and consistently beats Leela Zero.

I have a book, "Game Changer", in which a chess expert calls out several instances where AlphaZero made moves surprising at the time; situations where all chess engines rated things one way and AlphaZero rated them differently. When I enter them into Stockfish now, it usually rates things more similarly to the way AlphaZero did, and often chooses the move chosen by AlphaZero.

The only real test of course would be to dig up AlphaZero and run it again; but I think based on the evidence we have, Stockfish of 2026 would probably trounce AlphaZero of 2018 with equivalent compute available.

sinuhe69 19 minutes ago | parent [-]

I guess someone can twit Hassabis and ask him :D He certainly has access.

NooneAtAll3 10 minutes ago | parent [-]

who is Hassabis?

NitpickLawyer 4 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

On average, yes. Stockfish is the strongest engine and beats AZ-like implementations like Lc0 and the like. But on a game to game basis Lc0 can still win some games, depending on the starting position. It's rare that Lc0 can win both black and white starting from the same position, tho.

There are a few yt content creators that cover great engine games, if you're curious.

tumdum_ an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think so, see the tournament results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#...

noir_lord 26 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

> like AlphaZero?

Unknown, it was only around for a little while however there is Lila which is based on the same ideas as AlphaZero (and also a fantastic project generally) they generally trade blows with Stockfish coming very slightly ahead.

That said Stockfish also uses an NN (NNUE) these days so the line is getting more blurry.

kqp 8 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Like a red headed stepchild.

sapiogram 31 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Technically nobody knows, because AlphaZero was never made public. In practice, we know Stockfish 19 would destroy it, because it destroys open-source reimplementations of AlphaZero.

mattr03 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

yes and it has for a very long time. Stockfish took the neural net approach after AlphaZero showed it was a good idea as all modern chess engines have

lynx97 34 minutes ago | parent [-]

They basically replaced the static position evaluation function with a NN approach and kept the rest of the tree search mostly intact.

I ran fishtest on an old cluster for a while. Was nice to watch the stockfish team methodically improving things. Basically, every commit has to show it can beat the main branch before it gets merged.