Related papers: Evidence of Learned Look-Ahead in a Chess-Playing …

We investigate the look-ahead capabilities of chess-playing neural networks, specifically focusing on the Leela Chess Zero policy network. We build on the work of Jenner et al. (2024) by analyzing the model's ability to consider future…

Do neural networks build their representations through smooth, gradual refinement, or via more complex computational processes? We investigate this by extending the logit lens to analyze the policy network of Leela Chess Zero, a superhuman…

We have seen numerous machine learning methods tackle the game of chess over the years. However, one common element in these works is the necessity of a finely optimized look ahead algorithm. The particular interest of this research lies…

We present an end-to-end learning method for chess, relying on deep neural networks. Without any a priori knowledge, in particular without any knowledge regarding the rules of chess, a deep neural network is trained using a combination of…

While modern transformer neural networks achieve grandmaster-level performance in chess and other reasoning tasks, their internal computation process remains largely opaque. Focusing on Leela Chess Zero (LC0), we introduce a sparse…

AlphaZero, Leela Chess Zero and Stockfish NNUE revolutionized Computer Chess. This book gives a complete introduction into the technical inner workings of such engines. The book is split into four main chapters -- excluding chapter 1…

AI research in chess has been primarily focused on producing stronger agents that can maximize the probability of winning. However, there is another aspect to chess that has largely gone unexamined: its aesthetic appeal. Specifically, there…

Autoregressive language models trained with next-token prediction generate text by sampling one discrete token at a time. Although very scalable, this objective forces the model to commit at every step, preventing it from exploring or…

This report presents Giraffe, a chess engine that uses self-play to discover all its domain-specific knowledge, with minimal hand-crafted knowledge given by the programmer. Unlike previous attempts using machine learning only to perform…

Modern chess engines achieve superhuman performance through deep tree search and regressive evaluation, while human players rely on intuition to select candidate moves followed by a shallow search to validate them. To model this…

This paper suggests a forward-pruning technique for computer chess that uses 'Move Tables', which are like Transposition Tables, but for moves not positions. They use an efficient memory structure and has put the design into the context of…

Language models have shown unprecedented capabilities, sparking debate over the source of their performance. Is it merely the outcome of learning syntactic patterns and surface level statistics, or do they extract semantics and a world…

Lookahead search is perhaps the most natural and widely used game playing strategy. Given the practical importance of the method, the aim of this paper is to provide a theoretical performance examination of lookahead search in a wide…

As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly intelligent---in some cases, achieving superhuman performance---there is growing potential for humans to learn from and collaborate with algorithms. However, the ways in which AI systems…

Predicting player behavior in strategic games, especially complex ones like chess, presents a significant challenge. The difficulty arises from several factors. First, the sheer number of potential outcomes stemming from even a single…

Real-time heuristic search is a popular model of acting and learning in intelligent autonomous agents. Learning real-time search agents improve their performance over time by acquiring and refining a value function guiding the application…

Learning to solve complex sequences of tasks--while both leveraging transfer and avoiding catastrophic forgetting--remains a key obstacle to achieving human-level intelligence. The progressive networks approach represents a step forward in…

Recent large language models (LLMs) have shown strong reasoning capabilities. However, a critical question remains: do these models possess genuine strategic reasoning, or do they primarily excel at pattern recognition? To address this, we…

This paper uses chess, a landmark planning problem in AI, to assess transformers' performance on a planning task where memorization is futile $\unicode{x2013}$ even at a large scale. To this end, we release ChessBench, a large-scale…

We study how reasoning evolves in a language model -- from supervised fine-tuning (SFT) to reinforcement learning (RL) -- by analyzing how a set of theoretically-inspired datasets influences language model performance in chess. We find that…