It could have luckily coalesced from gas (a Boltzmann egg), or perhaps even more radically, been laid by a duck.
you say
>They didn't train their system by self-play and they certainly didn't hire an army of low-paid workers to annotate moves for them.
So you are certainly aware that there are avenues to creating the data set. Given that, it is quite reasonable to say that search is unnecessary.
They should do one of those instead of using search before they claim it’s possible to not use search.
Or to borrow your analogy, you’ll need to show me a duck egg to prove you can make omelettes without chickens. Making an omelette from chicken eggs and claiming hypothetically some mystery other animal could have done it is nonsense.
How is it unnecessary? They used none of those methods, so they had to use search. That is search being necessary, not the opposite.
The whole thing is just political: DeepMind use neural nets, GOFAI is dead and that's the way to AI. That's their story and they're sticking with it.
This has two possible applications: 1. There's far less need to invent techniques like MCTS in the first place. 2. A single AI might be able to play grandmaster level chess by accident.
The catch is you need high quality data in large amounts.
I just took it in the same way as saying that being a vegetarian is generally better for animal welfare, as you're not harming chickens as directly by eating an omelette, as you would by eating their wings.
It's like saying ChatGPT isn't a human brain.
It was trained with human brains. But it isn't a human brain.
That's like saying you can have eggs without chickens, because when you make an omelette you don't add chickens. It's completely meaningless and a big fat lie to boot.
The truth is that the system created by DeepMind consists of two components: a search-based system used to annotate a dataset of moves and a neural-net based system that generates moves similar to the ones in the dataset. DeepMind arbitrarily draw the boundary of the system around the neural net component and pretend that because the search is external to the neural net, the neural net doesn't need the search.
And yet, without the search there is no dataset, and without the dataset there is no model. They didn't train their system by self-play and they certainly didn't hire an army of low-paid workers to annotate moves for them. They generated training moves with a search-based system and learned to reproduce them. They used chickens to make eggs.
Their approach depends entirely on there being a powerful chess search engine and they wouldn't be able to create their system without it as a main component. Their "without search" claim is just a marketing term.