The Wikipedia link says this was against Stockfish 8. Could people please stop spreading FUD here?
If there's no public tournament, this might as well not have happened. I do not understand why Google is always special. Other engines are open, Google can test against Stockfish but not vice versa.
All these web companies take, take, take from Open Source and rarely give back.
I'll write a paper now that I beat Carlsen, but I'll refuse to do so in public.
Do you mean me? If so, why not say so. "Could people please stop X-ing here?" is very passive-aggressive. I looked up 'FUD' - Fear, uncertainty and doubt. Not sure how what I said counts as any of those. Your comment certainly seems to want to spread FUD, however. (And why is this your account's only comment on HN?)
I don't know the significance of your first sentence either. I know nothing about the versions of Stockfish used for this or anything else. Maybe you're taking too much for granted. i.e. that I know enough of the minutiae to understand your comments. Could you fill in the dots a bit? And who are 'all these web companies'?
I'm not super-interested in AlphaZero (or computer chess generally) - haven't read any of the papers, for example. But there's a lot of talk about the various Alphas in the online chess world, since before it was playing chess, and I found these videos very impressive. And it's ridiculous to say "This might as well not have happened". Maybe true for you, but not for the chess world, at all.
So, after the first match in which they played against an obviously crippled version of Stockfish, and published games that involved blundering full queens worth of material, I too was skeptical of the second paper. However the setup was entirely reasonable (they basically copied what had recently been used in a computer chess championship and it was plenty beefy) and no weird time controls were used.
You can still run the PGN of the published games back and find some places where Stockfish 8 will analyse its own moves and find them blunders, so it _would_ be good for all this to happen out in the open, but I don't think there's any large scale deception going on here. I think it's beyond reasonable doubt now that AlphaZero is easily as strong as they are claiming.
If there's no public tournament, this might as well not have happened. I do not understand why Google is always special. Other engines are open, Google can test against Stockfish but not vice versa.
All these web companies take, take, take from Open Source and rarely give back.
I'll write a paper now that I beat Carlsen, but I'll refuse to do so in public.