- Apr 30, 2013
- 33,876
- 21,070
- Country
- United States
- Gender
- Male
- Faith
- United Ch. of Christ
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- Private
- Politics
- US-Democrat
I made a fork of the GPL licensed Stocfkish chess engine, to explore some ideas I had, drawing inspiration from metaphysical realism, Platonic forms and information theory.
Because of my paradigm and background being so out of the mainstream (philosophy and theology) in typical chess engine development spaces, my project has met opposition, even personal attacks. I was really naive I guess to think that "collaboration" and "new ideas" wouldn't be welcomed in the Open Source space common to those kinds of communities. But human sinfulness tends to infiltrate all institutions, perhaps even at inception. My project has been criticized simply because I only changed a little bit of code in the source, and used a different conceptual framework for training the engine. The goal is to create a more human-aligned engine for chess game analysis, that can be used to produce analysis that elucidates strategic and positional themes, rather than the dominant paradigm in open-source chess engines, of seeing chess as a purely mathematical optimization problem, with the output a series of superhuman forcing tactics alien to how humans actually play chess. And so far the kind of data I we are generating raises deeper questions I think are worth exploring. My hypothesis, that a conceptually pure approach to chess evaluation networks, trained on the equivalent of hundreds of billions of exploratory playouts, should give a clearer strategic vision of chess than merely calculating strong forcing lines, has been confirmed. And this unsettles some people with entrenched interests in certain communities, because the underlying logic is alien to how they understand what a chess engine should be for.
Because of my paradigm and background being so out of the mainstream (philosophy and theology) in typical chess engine development spaces, my project has met opposition, even personal attacks. I was really naive I guess to think that "collaboration" and "new ideas" wouldn't be welcomed in the Open Source space common to those kinds of communities. But human sinfulness tends to infiltrate all institutions, perhaps even at inception. My project has been criticized simply because I only changed a little bit of code in the source, and used a different conceptual framework for training the engine. The goal is to create a more human-aligned engine for chess game analysis, that can be used to produce analysis that elucidates strategic and positional themes, rather than the dominant paradigm in open-source chess engines, of seeing chess as a purely mathematical optimization problem, with the output a series of superhuman forcing tactics alien to how humans actually play chess. And so far the kind of data I we are generating raises deeper questions I think are worth exploring. My hypothesis, that a conceptually pure approach to chess evaluation networks, trained on the equivalent of hundreds of billions of exploratory playouts, should give a clearer strategic vision of chess than merely calculating strong forcing lines, has been confirmed. And this unsettles some people with entrenched interests in certain communities, because the underlying logic is alien to how they understand what a chess engine should be for.
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