> Most of my direct messages were short:
“what code did you fix?” “any blog updates?” “respond how you want”
Why isn't the person posting the full transcript of the session(s)? How many messages did he send? What were the messages that weren't short?
Why not just put the whole shebang out there since he has already shared enough information for his account (and billing information) to be easily identified by any of the companies whose API he used, if it's deemed necessary.
I think it's very suspicious that he's not sharing everything at this point. Why not, if he wasn't actually pushing for it to act maliciously?
This is not true. Stockfish is not unbeatable by another engine, or another copy of Stockfish.
Chess engines have been impossible for humans to beat for well over a decade.
But a position in chess being solved is a specific thing, which is still very far from having happened for the starting position. Chess has been solved up to 7 pieces. Solving basically amounts to some absolutely massive tables that have every variation accounted for, so that you know whether a given position will end in a draw, black win or white win. (https://syzygy-tables.info)
The parent is using a different definition, so they put "solved" in quotes. What word would you suggest to describe the situation where the starting position with 32 pieces always ends in either a draw or win for white, regardless of the compute and creativity available to black?
I haven't verified OP's claim attributed to 'someone on the Stockfish discord', but if true, that's fascinating. There would be nothing left for the engine developers to do but improve efficiency and perhaps increase the win-to-draw ratio.
Yea that's true, it's a pretty overloaded word. From what I remember though, even the top players thought that there wasn't anywhere left to go with chess engines, before Alpha Zero basically ripped the roof off with a completely different play style back in 2017, beating Stockfish.
And the play style of Alpha Zero wasn't different in a way that needs a super trained chess intuition to see, it's outrageously different if you take a look at the games.
I guess my point is, that even if the current situation is basically a 'deadlock', it's been proven that it's not some sort of eternal knowledge of the game as of yet. There's still the possiblity that a new type of approach could blow the current top engines out of the water, with a completely different take on the game.
However, it is true that Elo gain on "balanced books" has stalled somewhat since Stockfish 16 in 2023, which is also reflected on the CCRL rating lists.
IMO AlphaZero was partially a result of the fact that using more compute also works. Stockfish 10 running on 4x as many CPUs would beat Stockfish 8 by a larger margin than AlphaZero did. To this day, nobody has determined what a "fair" GPU to CPU comparison is.
War was "solved" when someone made a weapon capable of killing all the enemy soldiers, until someone made a weapon capable of disabling the first weapon.
Do you have a source? I remember asking on the Stockfish Discord and being told that Stockfish on a modern laptop with 1 min per move will never lose against Stockfish with 1000 min per move from the starting position.
But I'm not sure whether that guy was guessing or confident about that claim.
There's the TCEC [0] which is a big thing in some circles. Stockfish does lose every now and then against top engines. [1] Usually it's two different engines playing against one another, though. Like Leela Chess Zero [2] vs. Stockfish.
In that hypothetical of running 2 instances of Stockfish against one another on a modern laptop, with the key difference being minutes of compute time, it'd probably be very close to 100% of draws. Depending on how many games you run. So, if you run a million games, there's probably some outliers. If you run a hundred, maybe not.
When it comes to actually solved positions, the 7-piece tables take around 1TB of RAM to even run. These tablebases are used by Stockfish when you actually want to run it at peak strength. [3]
Here's a game from a month ago where Stockfish loses to Lc0, played during the TCEC Cup. https://lichess.org/S9AwOvWn
Chess is a 2 player game of perfect, finite information, so by Zermelo's theorem either one side always wins with optimal play or it's a draw with optimal play. The argument from the Discord person simply says that Stockfish computationally can't come up with a way to beat itself. Whether this is true (and it really sounds like a question about depth in search) is separate from whether the game itself is solved, and it very much is not.
Solving chess would be a table that simply lists out the optimal strategy at every node in the game tree. Since this is computationally infeasible, we will certainly never solve chess absent some as yet unknown advance in computation.
That means that Stockfish's parameters are already optimized as far as practically possible for Rapid chess and Slow chess, not that chess itself is solved, or even that Stockfish is fully optimized for Blitz and Bullet.
Surely it is apparent to you that the first few moves are not independently chosen by the engine, but rather intentionally chosen by the TCEC bookmakers to create a position on the edge between a draw and a decisive result.
Yes, engines would almost certainly never play 2. f4. That's a different question than whether chess is solved, for which the question of interest would be "given optimal play after 1. e4 e5 2. f4 is the result a win for one side or a draw?"
It's also almost certainly the case, in that I don't know why you would do it, that Stockfish given the black pieces and extensive pondering would be meaningfully better than Stockfish with a time capped move order. Most games are going to be draws so practically it would take awhile to determine this.
I'm of the view that the actual answer for chess is "It's a draw with optimal play."
That just means that Stockfish doesn't get stronger with more than 1 minute per move on a modern computer. It doesn't say anything about other engines.
Stockfish with 1000 minutes per move is an approximation of a perfect chess player. So if Stockfish with 1 minute per move will never lose against a perfect player, it is unbeatable by any chess engine.
> On your way out the door, you hear the rumors: someone else did your thing years after you showed yours off. They got the credit, the bonus, the promotion, the recognition. They're a Senior now, or a Lead, or a Director, or a VP.
If it actually went down like this, that's pretty horrible, and that someone else is a grifter. Very harmful for any organization in the long run, because that behavior will be applied to anyone who's "ripe to be taken advantage of" (from his point of view), burning them out of the way.
That is, if they were aware that you made the thing that they picked up later. Though I wonder why the original didn't go through. The other person pushed harder for it to go through, or showed it off with a different sort of demo? Or was it a different sort of technical implementation / design?
I see this same thing now. In this case, it’s a more senior engineer and his manager taking credit for work a less senior engineer who’d left the team did.
There’s simply no advantage to crediting work to someone who’d left the team.
We love to blame those who are misfortunate. It’s called just world syndrome. It’s deeply uncomfortable to realize that this kind of thing is the norm, and justice is the exception. I’ve been extremely fortunate in my career, but not due to any special savviness of my own.
>grifter
blatantly naming ,the part you mention was under timing section I guess the grifter didn't just copy paste what our guy did. it did have more impact and well timed
Not sure if you mean that I'm being hostile for no reason towards this 'someone else'. The second section in my original post is the big conditional.
> I guess the grifter didn't just copy paste what our guy did. it did have more impact and well time
This is more than likely correct.
Either way, I do think it's grifter behavior to not mention/include anyone else who was involved in the project if you pick it up halfway through. Unless the code (or whatever else) is actually bad, and you have to do extra work to redo it. And, if you are actually aware who even worked on the project to begin with.
But it very well might've been a case where some higher up passed the project off to another programmer (months/years later) with no malicious intent whatsoever, and the programmer just did the thing as requested. Or a myriad of other explanations.
> much of it several dozen or thousands of layers of indirection deep
Assuming we're just talking about information on the internet: What are you reading if the original source is several dozen layers deep? In my experience, it's usually one or two layers deep. If it's more, that's a huge red flag.
Yes, and our own test could very well be flawed as well. Either way, from my experience there usually isn't that sort of massively long chain to get to the original research, more like a lot of people just citing the same original research.
True of academic research which has built systems and conventions specifically to achieve this, but very very little of what we know — even the most deeply academic among us — originates from “research” in the formal sense at all.
The comment thread above is not about how people should verify scientific claims of fact that are discussed in scientific formats. The comment is about a more general epistemic breakdown, 99.9999999% of which is not and cannot practically be “gotten to the bottom of” by pointing to some “original research.”
It's 100% that the bot is being heavily piloted by a person. Likely even copy pasting LLM output and doing the agentic part by hand. It's not autonomous. It's just someone who wants attention, and is getting lots of it.
Look at the actual bot's GitHub commits. It's just a bunch of blog posts that read like an edgy high schooler's musings on exclusion. After one tutorial level commit didn't go through.
This whole thing is theater, and I don't know why people are engaging with it as if it was anything else.
Even if it is, it's not hard to automate PR submissions, comments and blog posts, for some ulterior purpose. Combine that with the recent advances in inference quality and speed, and probable copy-cat behavior, any panic from this theater could lead to heavy-handed crackdown by the state.
Care to elaborate? Paid by whom?
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