That's simply not true. While stockfish does use a neural net, it's not using the MCTS approach like LeelaChessZero, and only uses the neural net for evaluating a position, not for suggesting moves. And it was only implemented after stockfish lost to lc0 in a computer chess tournament.
One day I just started making somewhat random moves (not terrible obviously, but unusual, and which sometimes gave me a temporary disadvantage). This completely messed with his style of play. He was trying to figure out what my grand strategy was I guess and tied himself in knots. From that moment, I could often beat him.
It’s a self reinforcing system. We need a major disruption to move on from it.
I personally prefer to avoid the term altogether in favor of more specific terms, like:
- LLM
- chess engine
- image generation model
etc
It is still "just" a minimax with alpha beta pruning, except the eval function is now a neural network. NNUE, to be more specific.
I highly advise anyone who is curious about chess engines, but hasn't heard about NNUE to read about it. I find this technology absolutely fascinating.
The key idea is that a neural network is structured in a way that makes it very cheap to calculate scores for similar positions. This means that during a tree search, each time you advance or backtrack you can update the score efficiently instead of recalculating it from scratch.
Good starting points to read more:
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efficiently_updatable_neural_n...
Also a reminder for anyone reading these comments that chess should be fun! Don't let psychological hangups like thinking u need a good memory, thinking you need to study openings, have a certain level of skill, or need to play a certain format (like avoiding blitz because it is "bad" for your game or thinking OTB is more important) stop you from playing chess! The only rules for how to play chess are the rules of the game; all the other stuff e.g advice about how to get good are just things people make up. Learn and play however you want and in whatever way brings you the most joy! Chess is a game and it is meant to be fun and not be taken seriously
It doesn't take extreme memory on your friend's part either if you keep falling for the same trick. It would take extreme memory for him to have something prepared against every plausible option you could choose.
Eg when they tested good chess players on random board positions they were just as good as people that did not play chess.
Doesn't that prove the opposite as the statement in the first paragraph if they were only as good as non-players? I assume there's a typo in there somewhere because I would expect the original thesis to be true. My gf would squarely beat me at chess960 just because she sees the relations between the pieces a million times faster. She can walk into a room and look at the board I've been 'rearranging' (playing on) for 45 minutes and still know what I should do faster than me
Things like not leaving a piece hanging undefended, not falling into one move tactical traps (forks/pins etc.), and learning how to check mate.
You can achieve all of that by playing slower games, and doing some puzzles.
I was being (slightly) flippant. As in any other discipline you do need to actually learn some things: tactics practice, basic endgames, basic opening principles.
But that's different from opening theory and what people usually mean by memorization. It is almost all pattern recognition and rules of thumb, and all the opening theory memorization in the world won't help you if you dont understand the ideas behind them. All the top players are extremely sharp tacticians long before they do any memorization.
And this isn't something new. Magnus has been doing this for a few years now, after getting bored of facing the same over prepped opponents. He has mastered this technique, and showed that he's still the GOAT at mid to late game positions once the opponent is out of prep. But again, he's not doing this "randomly", he's studying when and where he can do it to temporarily get a disadvantage that will sort itself out later in the game. And engines are heavily used still.
I used to love Private Eye and they have done great journalism that’s highly acclaimed, but the only thing they wrote that I really knew about (literally the office I was in) was outrageously wrong and would have been so easy to verify (ask literally anyone in the BBC building we were in to go to that floor, or take a tour or write an email). Can’t read it any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#Gell-Mann_amn...
In a speech in 2002, Crichton coined the term "Gell-Mann amnesia effect" to describe the phenomenon of experts reading articles within their fields of expertise and finding them to be error-ridden and full of misunderstanding, but seemingly forgetting those experiences when reading articles in the same publications written on topics outside of their fields of expertise, which they believe to be credible. He explained that he had chosen the name ironically, because he had once discussed the effect with physicist Murray Gell-Mann, "and by dropping a famous name I imply greater importance to myself, and to the effect, than it would otherwise have".
> As much as chess players can prepare, they can’t memorize everything. When they’re sitting at the board, their computers slumbering at home, they will inevitably be defined by the limits of their knowledge and ability. As a result, the elite grandmasters have realized the most valuable move is often the one that forces their opponents to start thinking with their brains rather than their engines, even if it might not be the “best” possible move.
I agree it's not exactly breaking new ground, but it's an okay article for a generalist audience.