Google’s AI teaches itself chess in 4 hours, then convincingly defeats Stockfish

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Google’s AI teaches itself chess in 4 hours, then convincingly defeats Stockfish

December 10th, 2017

Awake Goy

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There has just been a revolutionary development in the world of AI, and in the world of chess.

Google’s Artificial Intelligence project, DeepMind explains they’re on a scientific mission to push the boundaries of AI, developing programs that can learn to solve any complex problem without needing to be taught how. A little over a year ago, DeepMind released AlphaGo, which sensationally defeated the world champion of the famously CPU unfriendly ancient Chinese game, GO.

Now their AlphaZero program has kicked up a storm in the chess world. It obliterated Stockfish 8 in a closed-door, 100-game match with 28 wins, 72 draws, and zero losses. Stockfish is the go to chess engine for most top players today, and is generally regarded as the strongest chess playing engine in the world. Stockfish recently won the 2017 Chess.com Computer Chess Championship, and has an estimated ELO strength of over 3400. To put that into context, the world’s top-ranked human player, Magnus Carlsen has an Elo rating of 2837, at the time of writing.

AlphaZero appears to have totally outclassed Stockfish 8. And that’s not even the most astonishing part of it.