Hi all. I have a very interesting game from the realms of computer chess to
show - DeepMind which was the company that Google bought
from Demis Hassabis who was actually by the way someone I knew from from school
for a while who was himself a great chess enthusiast but he left Chess to
focus more on programming and game writing and all sorts of things
after that. Artificial Intelligence (AI) was a big interest so he founded DeepMind that was bought by
Google and now they defeated the Go world champion using some sort of
AI Neural Network - that they developed and more recently there's a Research paper which has just been
released the alpha0 algorithm developed by google and deepmind apparently took
only four hours of playing itself and it taught itself how to beat the world
computer champion Stockfish and it kind of beat stockfish twenty eight to zero
in a hundred game match but I think the time limit might be pretty short like
one minute each for these games but nevertheless it's pretty shocking news
for the world of chess AI as I can tell because I I believe that there wasn't
much scope for improvement outside of the incremental brute-force search
better Hardware was the primary driver but
I guess the heuristics that chess engine writers have been evolving over the
years and the other things they've been doing to try and make them their chess
programs better and better that's been just super surpassed by this approach of
I think it's called reinforcement learning it just teaches itself with
reinforcement learning and so a neural network teaching itself but with it in
more generic search algorithm anyway let's have a look at one of the games so
deep mind's playing black against stockfish so e4 e5 Knight f3 knight c6
we have Bishop b5 Knight f6 so it does like the Berlin defence it
hasn't been given anything no opening book no end games no nothing it's just
been taught itself and it's arrived at this conclusion this is a good opening
so the super Grandmasters might be right after all it's kind of validated a lot of the
popular Chess openings as well in what it plays d3 Bishop c5 white took on c6 now
White Castles and White is attacking that pawn now that's protected Nbd2
black castles Queen e1 so f6 some pressure on e5 is released -
reinforced here Knight c4 and now rook f7 which gives f8 for the Bishop a4 the
bishop goes back here rather than say on this diagonal King h1 Nc5. The Knights
preparing to reroute a5 Ne6. It seems you know very human-like play at the moment
now this sacrifice looks a little bit dodgy you might think but it looks like
one of the moves which can promise to give white something because there's a
lot of pressure on the black position and in fact in this position now so it's
2 points for the Knights you know White has got this kind of rolling pawn
Center potentially and here after Ne5 - a repetition is avoided actually with
a6 when we see another point that this whole structure is being
attacked c5 f4 so there's definitely some
compensation for that piece sac Queen e8 a takes bishop takes a now Queen a5
and you can see pawns double attacked. Well there's a lot of pressure on blacks
position this protects at the moment there's a lot pressure on that position
Knight d4 Queen drops back and now yeah with this pressure here we see okay rook
e6 protects that pawn bishop Eve free is played
if this comes back
Bishop III rook b6 okay we have light c4 now rook b4 be free a five-star offering
a pawn here actually and all the pauses quite a few pawns Knight takes Bishop a
sex now Bishop takes rotate so let's examine the material situation it says
the bishop power versus night and four pawns are they three four three four
five six seven quite a lot so at night in free pawns at the moment but these
are just doubled pawns as well these are not great pawns here so we see Knight
see for routine ain't G free h6 and there's a hint with h6 that's something
like g5 might happen later Queen a5 now it becomes four pawns offs this yeah
because it's double attack on a six and c5 and black doesn't want to relinquish
the bishop pair so an interesting decision here what's a bishop c8 it's a
it's a lot of home-button dust so what can the bishop pair do here
while some escape squares for the King and taken with this as well
so eyeing those light squares now rook d7 Queen e5 and then in fact with this
the Queen's just come off because blacks got that iPhone out but Oh Kim black
create some sort of attack here night c4 g5 so the bishop can use this diagonal
now rook c1 Bishop g7 95 rook hates waiting around there for a moment by a
free Bishop b2 I wish it drops here so you're not committing the rock and the
rock can use f8 square in some cases like g1
Pusha drops back to d7 92 Bishop d2 yeah Bishop e3 keeping the pressure on
White's pawn chain and now Bishop g4 so the bishops are working well together
there now Bishop d2 and you can see that this will this infiltration black
starting to put so much pressure up that's gonna win some material soon
after H free yeah rook Bishop takes e to rock have to black gives back piece here
now if G takes them rook takes c2 for my bishop d4 all the pawns are going to go
so we have this one rook takes easy but this leaves quite a dominating dark
square bishop all these pawns on light squares this looks a bit silly comical
in fact you know this this extra bishop is actually quite post on air and there
looks quite aggressive King g7 g for another pollen lights ground this dark
square bishop all these pawns on light squares so the bishop has a free rein on
the dark squares and the King comes up traveling across dark squares that looks
like a desperate pawn sacrifice off to e5 gets taken or okay one we have two
ends yeah Black's making inroads here check and these poems are going to be
dropping off the site should drop off leaving black simply our Bishop up
yeah simply a bishop up here and so it's just a matter of consolidating really
the position and here the oppressor or maybe the computer just resigns itself I
think probably the operators resigned on White's behalf so this game is just an
example of something gigantic basically called reinforcement learning I had
assumed wrongly that the kind of techniques used to beat that go while
champions wouldn't be used in chess I was wrong apparently self learning has
got quite a lot of potential it seems that stockfish was crushed is just
remarkable using a combination of genetic algorithm
and more generic sort of searching algorithm it's phenomenal stuff it's
it's another landmark it's another checkpoint in AI history
generally not just chess AI but a AI has used chess as a vehicle for many years
for explorations as a perfect information game so it's remarkable I
want to show other games from this match and see what we can learn about opening
choices middle game ideas etc from this one it seems it echoes some advice told
that pieces are often worth more than pawns and you can see that the pieces
have more potential is interesting that black rot would rather give up upon than
lose the bishop pair at one point only one later it cashed out one of its
bishops entirely to do a lot of damage and stop that insert to get all the
pawns back so I hope you got something from this and it's a fascinating
landmark example gained from the recent paper which I'll put in the description
of the video you might might want to check out commerce questions like shares
appreciated patronage