Lifetime Repertoire Caro-Kann

98 Shares

We’ve all been reading about the AlphaZero, the incredible superior being created by Google’s DeepMind to rule the chess world.

Well, it turns out the Artificially Intelligent behemoth of Biblical-proportions is human after all – or at least in a figurative sense.

AlphaZero may have destroyed Stockfish and crushed every computer on the planet. But, as Grandmaster David Howell has revealed, it hasn’t swept every human aside every single time.

GM David Howell took on AlphaZero, and drew

GM Howell, a guest at Chessable’s meet-up event last month, told in his column for UK newspaper The Sunday Times that he and three other plucky Brits held AlphaZero to an heroic draw.

GM Yasser Seirawan\'s Winning Chess Strategies

Given everything we’ve seen and read about the neural network this seems incredible. So how did this happen?

AlphaZero .5

On GM Howell’s team were the businessman Christopher Flowers, the president of the English Chess Federation’s Dominic Lawson and International Master and chess impresario Malcolm Pein.

Mr Flowers, a keen chess player and a philanthropic financier, had won the chance to become the first human to take on the beast at a charity auction.

The full peer-reviewed #AlphaZero paper published today in @sciencemagazine https://t.co/eThRIHaJyw

along with more than 200 games which show off its beautiful style https://t.co/MaNhqlUpmr I hope you enjoy them!

as a chess player, it feels like chess from another dimension 🙂 pic.twitter.com/CDDP5PqNsv — Demis Hassabis (@demishassabis) December 6, 2018

Having enlisted help of two masters with Mr Lawson, the team played two two-hour games against AlphaZero at the London headquarters of Google last April.

So the stage was set. The awesome-foursome entered to the sound of Florence and The Machine ready to take on the beast. It was humanity’s last stand – how would they tackle it?

Following GM Howell’s suggestion, they played 1. e4 and went for the notoriously drawish Berlin Defence…

And to their utter surprise, AlphaZero obliged.

A new AI program called AlphaZero can achieve mastery of some of the most complex board games known—and it can teach itself to play with no prior knowledge except each game’s rules. https://t.co/rQhrwOpROr pic.twitter.com/8c5tkJhNFX — Science Magazine (@ScienceMagazine) December 7, 2018

“Mercilessly, we took every opportunity to hoover off the pieces,” Mr Lawson in his column in the same newspaper.

He even described their tactics as “the chess equivalent of a side close to a desired nil-nil draw in football taking the ball down to the corner flag and standing on it”.

The Alpha males

Mr Lawson added: “After 36 moves AlphaZero’s invisible operator – perhaps instructed by Demis, who was not in the room with us at this point – communicated the offer of a draw. We graciously accepted.

“This result revealed a shortcoming (of a purely sporting nature) in AlphaZero. It doesn’t know that it is infinitely stronger than any opponent it might come across.”

IM Malcolm Pein talking about the AlphaZero game

But was this a human mistake to make? Mr Lawson thinks not.

“An equivalent human would never play an opening that allowed a much weaker opponent a route to a sterile position. He (or she) would play a more double-edged opening, even taking a theoretically inferior line, if it promised complications that would confuse a lower-rated adversary.

“That’s not (yet) something the neural networks of AlphaZero have been built to compute . It doesn’t do cunning.”

Back in April I was part of a team that played a match against AlphaZero. Check out my column in today's @thesundaytimes for exclusive coverage of the games! Dominic Lawson has also written a great piece on our experience of the match. — David Howell (@DavidHowellGM) December 9, 2018

GM Howell said: “To our amazement we managed to draw the first game using an opening that leads to rapid simplification. The second game was a different story.”

Here’s the second – and far more interesting – game:

[Event "?"] [Site "?"] [Date "2018.10.20"] [Round "12"] [White "AlphaZero"] [Black "Flowers, Howell, Pein, Lawson"] [Result "*"] [ECO "E73"] [PlyCount "57"] 1. d4 Nf6 2. c4 g6 3. Nc3 Bg7 4. e4 d6 5. Be2 O-O 6. Be3 c5 7. d5 e6 8. Nf3 exd5 9. cxd5 b5 10. e5 dxe5 11. Bxc5 Re8 12. Bxb5 Nbd7 13. Be3 Ng4 14. O-O Nxe3 15. fxe3 Qb6 16. Kh1 Qxe3 17. d6 e4 18. Nd5 Qc5 19. Nc7 Rf8 20. Rc1 Qh5 21. Nd4 Qxd1 22. Rfxd1 Bxd4 23. Nxa8 Be3 24. Rc3 Bf4 25. Nc7 Be5 26. Rc4 Rd8 27. Rxe4 Bb7 28. Re2 Bf4 29. Bxd7 Rxd7 30. Re7 Rxd6 31. Rxd6 Bxd6 32. Rd7 Bc5 33. Ne6 Bxg2+ 34. Kxg2 fxe6 35. Kf1 e5 36. Ke2 Bd4 37. b4 h5 38. a4 g5 39. Kf1 g4 40. Kg2 h4 * your web browser and/or your host do not support iframes as required to display the chessboard; alternatively your wordpress theme might suppress the html iframe tag from articles or excerpts

Leon is a national newspaper journalist from London, England. He is an avid chess fan, and writes regularly about the game. Apart from chess, he loves cricket, Tottenham Hotspur FC and spending time with his son.