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.
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.