Hi Marco,
Thanks for sharing this information. Regarding SugaR can you provide more information about the difference between SugaR and Stockfish. I believe you have implemented Monte Carlo search amongst other functionalities. How do you see it as playing differently to Stockfish and for searches or Correspondence chess where do you see SugaR when compared to Stockfish.
Perhaps you can explain how the Monte Carlo approach hopes to achieve and equalize the artificial intelligence approach of LC0?
Also I am curious since there is a lot of hype about LC0 and Leila what do you see as improvements with these compared to Stockfish or SugaR? Do you see the possibility that they will at some point overtake chess as the only method?
Me I am sceptical because I do not personally see a load of tables that make up an Encyclopedia as intelligence myself. I see it more as just a database of evaluated positions, but then again I am not involved in programming myself so perhaps I am just being dumb.
I tend to in my simple mind think of LC0 approach as "anyone can act smart" but are they really?
I mean by that, the simplest of person can make themselves sound intelligent in a chat room when all he has to do is search in Google to find a clever response and then copy and paste it
Creativity and intelligence to me is to look at for example Chess Genius 1 written in 1993 I think, which is a 61 KB program which even in our tournament has the ability to beat a 2600 ELO program which has maybe 20 - 40 times more code and no end game table bases and a simple opening book of 438 KB. This of course makes me wonder what a Genius 1 could achieve if it could play at the same speed as engines playing on an I7 or I9 multi-core processor.
Maybe someday soon by creating a DOSBox Windows 98 it might be possible to really compare assuming Arena were possible inside Windows 98 to see actual imrovements between say a Stockfish and Genius 1 for example at the same speed?
So I guess what I view as intelligence is a simple program that works something out by itself without having to pull information from other sources.. ie encyclopedias.
ps. since you have worked for years with the development of Stockfish teams and SugaR, what are you seeing as the future development and progression of computer chess? Do you think that there might even be a trend towards going backwards and create programs that the human or Grandmaster can enjoy and play against? I mean head to head and no messing around with putting the engine down to for example 0.01% as a setting
Best regards
Nick