software developers, Stockfish today represents the pinnacle of chess logic.
Not only is it a chess engine, but it can analyze any game, any position,
giving grandmaster-level feedback within seconds of each move a player
makes.
Stockfish was happily going along being the king of the computerized
chess mountain, being the gold standard of all chess analysis worldwide, until
2018, when Google showed up to the party.
Then shit got weird.
Google has a program called AlphaZero. It’s not chess software. It’s
artificial intelligence (AI) software. Instead of being programmed to play
chess or another game, the software is programmed to learn—and not just
chess, but any game.
Early in 2018, Stockfish faced off against Google’s AlphaZero. On paper,
it was not even close to a fair fight. AlphaZero can calculate “only” eighty
thousand board positions per second. Stockfish? Seventy million. In terms of
computational power, that’s like me entering a footrace against a Formula
One race car.
But it gets even weirder: the day of the match, AlphaZero didn’t even
know how to play chess. Yes, that’s right—before its match with the best
chess software in the world, AlphaZero had less than a day to learn chess
from scratch. The software spent most of the day running simulations of chess
games against itself, learning as it went. It developed strategies and principles
the same way a human would: through trial and error.
Imagine the scenario. You’ve just learned the rules of chess, one of the
most complex games on the planet. You’re given less than a day to mess
around with a board and figure out some strategies. And from there, your first
game ever will be against the world champion.
Good luck.
Yet, somehow, AlphaZero won. Okay, it didn’t just win. AlphaZero
smashed Stockfish. Out of one hundred games, AlphaZero won or drew every
single game.
Read that again: a mere nine hours after learning the rules to chess,
AlphaZero played the best chess-playing entity in the world and did not drop
a single game out of one hundred. It was a result so unprecedented that people
still don’t know what to make of it. Human grandmasters marveled at the
creativity and ingenuity of AlphaZero. One, Peter Heine Nielsen, gushed, “I
always wondered how it would be if a superior species landed on earth and
showed us how they play chess. I feel now I know.”^5