Sure, Stockfish is a very impressive piece of technology, and I'm not trying to take away from that.

The way I see it, and what stands out as really cool to me is that we seem to be living through a phase transition to the third major era of chess, based on what type of player was strongest:

500 AD - 1997 AD: Humans.

1997 AD - 2019 AD: "Classical" minmax computer chess engines.

2019 AD - ???: Reinforcement learning engines.

It's extremely exciting to witness.

Just like the invention of the car didn't make horse races obsolete, I wonder if we'll see high-level computer chess competition split into two categories, one where using pre-trained models is not allowed.

Kasparov complained that Deep Blue had access to a myriad of his historical games, so it could prepare purposely just against one opponent. At the same time, Kasparov hadn't any access to train against Deep Blue's way of playing.

Stockfish had a similar disadvantage against Alphazero. With LC0 being more openly available, it can start improving its heuristics against this type of opponents.

It is called zero because it only play with itself. Follow alpha go zero and leeks zero.

It has not studied human play. Unlike alpha go.

I agree with you in general, but to be perfectly fair, even the Zero-style AIs have a few hyperparameters such as block size and CPUCT value etc that can be tuned to produce engines that play differently. And if Stockfish is the measuring stick by which you gauge progress, you'll tune those values to produce good anti-stockfish nets.

That said, I think the effect here is probably negligible.

Except that LC0 wins decisively against all other engines too. You just hear about the wins vs. Stockfish because Stockfish is the best conventional engine so that's more newsworthy.

Sure, but that doesn't really change my point, only the dates involved. You can debate how fair the Kasparov - Deep Blue match was, but even being maximally generous, by the mid 2000s it was completely impossible for a human to beat a computer in a serious, fair match.

> it's insane that Stockfish, running on CPUs and crude handmade heuristics, is able to keep up at all.

Seems like another nail in the coffin for symbolic AI.

Only if you think skill in chess translates to actual intelligence. As a chess master, I tend to benefit from this myth, but it’s bogus.

The idea that computer chess is a stepping stone to common sense AGI is also fairly absurd to me.

Don’t get me wrong. Leela is a great project. Just see it for it is, an impressive demo showing how machine learning algs paired with massive compute has led to increased performance in a perfect-information game like chess. It’s not a “nail in the coffin” of anything other than possibly Stockfish’s reign as strongest chess player. No more, no less.