Giraffe is the most successful attempt I know of to build a NN-based chess program. It played pretty well but much weaker (on standard PC hardware) than more standard fast-searching rival programs. Of course it’s entirely possible that the DeepMind team could do better. Giraffe’s NN is a fairly simple and shallow one; I forget what AlphaGo’s looks like but I think it’s much bigger. (That doesn’t mean a bigger one would be better for chess; as I indicated above, I suspect the optimal size of a NN for playing chess may be zero.)
Giraffe is the most successful attempt I know of to build a NN-based chess program. It played pretty well but much weaker (on standard PC hardware) than more standard fast-searching rival programs. Of course it’s entirely possible that the DeepMind team could do better. Giraffe’s NN is a fairly simple and shallow one; I forget what AlphaGo’s looks like but I think it’s much bigger. (That doesn’t mean a bigger one would be better for chess; as I indicated above, I suspect the optimal size of a NN for playing chess may be zero.)