One of the first interesting outcomes of the first published games from Alpha Zero was that the program "rediscovered" the Berlin Defense, GM Kramnik's invention and weapon in his WC match against Kasparov.
This is interesting, because before this, established view on chess engines was, that they do require an opening database - the fruits of hundreds of years of human chess culture. Now, a program on a modern machine can invent openings, and do other creative work.
This article, in parts, is rather technical, detailed.
However, do not be scared! It also delivers valuable insights for the chess player.
Moreover, note, that no other than Kramnik himself coauthored this paper!
Enjoy the read!
Daniel
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link: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2111.09259.pdf
Title: Acquisition of Chess Knowledge in AlphaZero
Authors: Thomas McGrath, Andrei Kapishnikov, Nenad Tomasev, Adam Pearce, Demis Hassabis, Been Kim, Ulrich Paquet, Vladimir Kramnik
Abstract:
"
What is learned by sophisticated neural network agents such as AlphaZero? This question is of both scientific and practical
interest. If the representations of strong neural networks bear no resemblance to human concepts, our ability to understand
faithful explanations of their decisions will be restricted, ultimately limiting what we can achieve with neural network interpretability.
In this work we provide evidence that human knowledge is acquired by the AlphaZero neural network as it trains on the game
of chess. By probing for a broad range of human chess concepts we show when and where these concepts are represented
in the AlphaZero network. We also provide a behavioural analysis focusing on opening play, including qualitative analysis
from chess Grandmaster Vladimir Kramnik. Finally, we carry out a preliminary investigation looking at the low-level details of
AlphaZero’s representations, and make the resulting behavioural and representational analyses available online.
"