“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more holistically

Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by bluecalm on Thursday October 08, 2026 @07:35AM (#50004593)

Stockfish and other classical engines were never intended to be run in matches without opening books (of which there were plenty). Development assumed the presence of opening book and authors made 0 effort to make engines play well in openings because of it. This is also the reason classical Stockfish was a very small binary. A little effort to make it even by including even a very small opening book (like 50MB or something that would result in still smaller binary than NN engine with its net) would make it much more interesting.

The result was that Stockfish lost many games by walking into known bad lines and lost way more games than it otherwise would.

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Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by squidbeak on Thursday October 08, 2026 @08:05AM (#50004830)

You aren't correct.

> We also played a match that started from the set of opening positions used in the 2016 TCEC world championship, along with a series of additional matches against the most recent development version of Stockfish, and a variant of Stockfish that uses a strong opening book. In all matches, AlphaZero won.

https://deepmind.google/blog/alphazero-shedding-new-light-on...

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Re:“Math 2.0” will need to value mathematical progress more ... by bluecalm on Thursday October 08, 2026 @10:30AM (#50006283)

Ok I remember it vaguely but the match that got publicity and the one published results were derived from was 1000 games match from starting position. Deepmind claimed AlphaZero also won from TCEC positions and vs Stockfish with good opening book but at least back in the day I don't think I could find those games being published or specifics about books/positions they have used. Can you?

I am not claiming AlphaZero wasn't stronger. It wasn't as strong as the PR piece suggested though and we have never seen the games being published. In chess this is extraordinary because basically all games in chess are publicly available - both human and computer games. Claiming "we have created a strong engine that has beaten Stockfish with opening book" while not showing those games (or details about opening book used) is akin to "we solved this math conjecture" without showing any kind of proof or argument.

Publishing a few 1000 of games costs nothing. Tens/hundreds of thousands of games are published every day.

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