According to DeepMind, AlphaZero reached the benchmarks necessary to defeat Stockfish in a mere four hours.
In other words, it was only given the rules of the game and then played against itself many millions of times (44 million games in the first nine hours, according to DeepMind).ĪlphaZero uses its neural networks to make extremely advanced evaluations of positions, which negates the need to look at over 70 million positions per second (like Stockfish does). It is a computer program that reached a virtually unthinkable level of play using only reinforcement learning and self-play in order to train its neural networks. Here is what you need to know about AlphaZero:ĪlphaZero was developed by the artificial intelligence and research company DeepMind, which was acquired by Google. Let's learn more about this powerful chess entity. It was not defeated by a human but by an unknown computer program that seemed to be otherworldly-AlphaZero.
In 2017 the chess world was shaken to its core when Stockfish (the world's strongest chess engine) was defeated in a one-sided match.
