The emergence of A0 as a pretender to the chess engine throne against the Magnus Carlsen of computer chess, the free, open and universally available Stockfish, has created a dilemma beyond the ethical ones connected with the rather unscientific, unfair and unbalanced ways Alphabet/Google/DeepMind handled the whole affair, among other things by publishing papers without the complete games collection. We have had secret diplomacy for a long time now, are we moving into secret science now? Sprinkled with a certain “do evil” in China perhaps?

Anyway, I think I know how to handle the computational imbalance, the asymmetric threat caused by A0’s use of additional hardware, the almighty TPUs in A0 and the more modest GPUs in the open source effort Leela Chess, Lc0. My clue came from Google themselves, in some comments that they made when they first established themselves as the superior search engine: there is no secret they said, we are just more efficient at doing what everybody else in the space are doing.

That efficiency came partly from custom designed computers that stayed not only within a low cost range but also with low operating costs, the all important power consumption/thermal envelope kept as low as possible. This resolves it then : A0 and Lc0 should simply participate in tournaments by capping their wattage at a pre-agreed level. So the addition of GPUs to the deep learning computer should be offset by a much weaker CPU compared to what Stockfish would be using. In this kind of arrangement it may be impractical or even impossible to add the GPU power A0 and Lc0 would like to have. Purists may disagree with this compromise from both directions, A0 may argue “why restrict our ability to use the TPUs when we clearly worked hard to be the only ones who can program them for chess”, Stockfish fans could complain “we all know CPUs and GPUs are overoptimized for exactly this kind of per watt metric, we are at a disadvantage, but at the day that would be the Google solution, and they don’t often make big mistakes. Google it!

