OT: what's the state of the art in non-GM level computer chess?
Say I want to play chess with an opponent that is at about the same skill level as me, or perhaps I want to play with an opponent about 100 rating points above me for training.
Most engines let you dumb them down by cutting search depth, but that usually doesn't work well. Sure, you end up beating them about half the time if you cut the search down enough but it generally feels like they were still outplaying you for much of the game and you won because they made one or two blunders.
What I want is a computer opponent that plays at a level of my choosing but plays a game that feels like that of a typical human player of that level.
I did a talk about this! (And also wrote up about my talk here[1]). This paper is a great example of both knowledge distillation. It's less of a paper about chess and more about how complicated non linear search functions - complete with whatever tuning experts can prepare - can be distilled into a (quasi-linear, if it's a standardized input like chess) transformer model.
I believe GM and chess author (and all-round lovely fellow) Matthew Sadler rigged up Leela Zero to effectively play off intuition and do very little or no search for training games. He could usually beat it, but not always. Think it might have been in The Silicon Road to Chess Improvement.
tzs ·5 hours ago
Say I want to play chess with an opponent that is at about the same skill level as me, or perhaps I want to play with an opponent about 100 rating points above me for training.
Most engines let you dumb them down by cutting search depth, but that usually doesn't work well. Sure, you end up beating them about half the time if you cut the search down enough but it generally feels like they were still outplaying you for much of the game and you won because they made one or two blunders.
What I want is a computer opponent that plays at a level of my choosing but plays a game that feels like that of a typical human player of that level.
Are there such engines?
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hlfshell ·6 hours ago
[1]: https://hlfshell.ai/posts/deepmind-grandmaster-chess-without...
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Scene_Cast2 ·1 hours ago
It uses paradigmatic PyTorch with easy to read code, and the architecture is similar to the current best performing chess neural nets.
sourcepluck ·21 minutes ago
osti ·4 hours ago
The best neural network chess engine's authors wrote about this deepminds publication.