Deep Reinforcement Learning Machine Has Taught Itself to Play Chess at Higher Levels
Reporter: Aviva Lev-Ari, PhD, RN
“Chess, after all, is special; it requires creativity and advanced reasoning. No computer could match humans at chess.” That was a likely argument before IBM surprised the world about computers playing chess. In 1997, Deep Blue’s entry won the World Chess Champion, Garry Kasparov.
Matthew Lai records the rest: “In the ensuing two decades, both computer hardware and AI research advanced the state-of-art chess-playing computers to the point where even the best humans today have no realistic chance of defeating a modern chess engine running on a smartphone.”
Now Lai has another surprise. His report on how a computer can teach itself chess—and not in the conventional way—is on arXiv. The title of the paper is “Giraffe: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Chess.” Departing from the conventional method of teaching computers how to play chess by giving them hardcoded rules, this project set out to use machine learning to figure out how to play chess. Namely, he said that deep learning was applied to chess in his work. “We use deep networks to evaluate positions, decide which branches to search, and order moves.”
As for other chess engines, Lai wrote, “almost all chess engines in existence today (and all of the top contenders) implement largely the same algorithms. They are all based on the idea of the fixed-depth minimax algorithm first developed by John von Neumann in 1928, and adapted for the problem of chess by Claude E. Shannon in 1950.”
This Giraffe is a chess engine using self-play to discover all its domain-specific knowledge. “Minimal hand-crafted knowledge is given by the programmer,” he said.
Results? Lai said ,”The results showed that the learned system performs at least comparably to the best expert-designed counterparts in existence today, many of which have been fine tuned over the course of decades.”
OK, not at super-Grandmaster levels, but impressive enough. “With all our enhancements, Giraffe is able to play at the level of an FIDE [Fédération Internationale des Échecs, or World Chess Federation] International Master on a modern mainstream PC,” he stated. “While that is still a long way away from the top engines today that play at super-Grandmaster levels, it is able to defeat many lower-tier engines, most of which search an order of magnitude faster.”
Addressing the value of Lai’s work in this paper, MIT Technology Review, stated that, “In a world first, an artificial intelligence machine plays chess by evaluating the board rather than using brute force to work out every possible move.” Giraffe, said the review, taught itself to play chess by evaluating positions much more like humans.
Sourced through Scoop.it from: techxplore.com
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