The NN thing inside stockfish is called the NNUE, and it is a small neural net used for evaluation (no policy head for choosing moves). The clever part of it is that it is “efficiently updatable” (i.e. if you’ve computed the evaluation of one position, and now you move a single piece, getting the updated evaluation for the new position is cheap). This feature allows it to be used quickly with CPUs; stockfish doesn’t really use GPUs normally (I think this is because moving the data on/off the GPU is itself too slow! Stockfish wants to evaluate 10 million nodes per second or something.)
This NNUE is not directly comparable to alphazero and isn’t really a descendant of it (except in the sense that they both use neural nets; but as far as neural net architectures go, stockfish’s NNUE and alphazero’s policy network are just about as different as they could possibly be.)
I don’t think it can be argued that we’ve improved 1000x in compute over alphazero’s design, and I do think there’s been significant interest in this (e.g. MuZero was an attempt at improving alphazero, the chess and Go communities coded up Leela, and there’s been a bunch of effort made to get better game playing bots in general).
The NN thing inside stockfish is called the NNUE, and it is a small neural net used for evaluation (no policy head for choosing moves). The clever part of it is that it is “efficiently updatable” (i.e. if you’ve computed the evaluation of one position, and now you move a single piece, getting the updated evaluation for the new position is cheap). This feature allows it to be used quickly with CPUs; stockfish doesn’t really use GPUs normally (I think this is because moving the data on/off the GPU is itself too slow! Stockfish wants to evaluate 10 million nodes per second or something.)
This NNUE is not directly comparable to alphazero and isn’t really a descendant of it (except in the sense that they both use neural nets; but as far as neural net architectures go, stockfish’s NNUE and alphazero’s policy network are just about as different as they could possibly be.)
I don’t think it can be argued that we’ve improved 1000x in compute over alphazero’s design, and I do think there’s been significant interest in this (e.g. MuZero was an attempt at improving alphazero, the chess and Go communities coded up Leela, and there’s been a bunch of effort made to get better game playing bots in general).