I do think Go is more tactical / sensitive to detailed changes than all that, and also that it’s not as easy as it looks to narrow the range of plausible moves especially when there’s nothing tactical going on, so this working in Go makes me optimistic about Chess. I agree that it’s not a slam dunk but I’d certainly like to see it tried. One frustrating thing is that negative results aren’t reported, so there might be lots of things that interestingly didn’t work and they wouldn’t tell us.
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.)
I do think Go is more tactical / sensitive to detailed changes than all that, and also that it’s not as easy as it looks to narrow the range of plausible moves especially when there’s nothing tactical going on, so this working in Go makes me optimistic about Chess. I agree that it’s not a slam dunk but I’d certainly like to see it tried. One frustrating thing is that negative results aren’t reported, so there might be lots of things that interestingly didn’t work and they wouldn’t tell us.
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.)