alt Hacker NewsQuestion: does Stockfish beat more generic systems like AlphaZero?
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It's widely believed so because Stockfish finds all of the right (or better moves) in the games from the original paper.
I think so, see the tournament results: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Top_Chess_Engine_Championship#...
On average, yes. Stockfish is the strongest engine and beats AZ-like implementations like Lc0 and the like. But on a game to game basis Lc0 can still win some games, depending on the starting position. It's rare that Lc0 can win both black and white starting from the same position, tho.
There are a few yt content creators that cover great engine games, if you're curious.
> like AlphaZero?
Unknown, it was only around for a little while however there is Lila which is based on the same ideas as AlphaZero (and also a fantastic project generally) they generally trade blows with Stockfish coming very slightly ahead.
That said Stockfish also uses an NN (NNUE) these days so the line is getting more blurry.
Technically nobody knows, because AlphaZero was never made public. In practice, we know Stockfish 19 would destroy it, because it destroys open-source reimplementations of AlphaZero.
yes and it has for a very long time. Stockfish took the neural net approach after AlphaZero showed it was a good idea as all modern chess engines have
Like a red headed stepchild.
My understanding is that AlphaZero only really existed for a year or two; there's no objective way to compare it at the moment.
Leela Zero tried to open-source that work, but Stockfish incorporated a number of improvements from AlphaZero, including a neural network and a different search method, and consistently beats Leela Zero.
I have a book, "Game Changer", in which a chess expert calls out several instances where AlphaZero made moves surprising at the time; situations where all chess engines rated things one way and AlphaZero rated them differently. When I enter them into Stockfish now, it usually rates things more similarly to the way AlphaZero did, and often chooses the move chosen by AlphaZero.
The only real test of course would be to dig up AlphaZero and run it again; but I think based on the evidence we have, Stockfish of 2026 would probably trounce AlphaZero of 2018 with equivalent compute available.