It is International Master-level without tree search. Good amateur
International masters are emphatically not amateurs. Indeed, IMs are at the level where they can offer coaching services to amateur players, and reasonably expect to be paid something on the order of $100 per session. To elaborate on this point:
there are >1000 players in the world that are better.
The total number of FIDE-rated chess players is over 500,000. The number of IMs, meanwhile, totals less than 3,000. IMs are quite literally in the 99th percentile of chess ability, and that’s actually being extremely restrictive with the population—there are many casual players who don’t have FIDE ratings at all, since only people who play in at least one FIDE-rated tournament will be assigned a rating.
I didn’t say anything about chess or shogi because I don’t recall any ablation for A0, I just remember the one in the AG0 paper for Go. The AG0 is definitely at or close to professional level and better than ‘good amateur’. And I would consider a non-distributed PUCT with no rollouts or other refinements to be a ‘simple tree search’: it doesn’t do any rollouts, and the depth is seriously limited by running on only a single machine w/4 TPUs with a few seconds for search: as the AG0 paper puts it, “Finally, it uses a simpler tree search that relies upon this single neural network to evaluate positions and sample moves, without performing any Monte-Carlo rollouts...we chose to use the simplest possible search algorithm”.
This is incorrect. It is International Master-level without tree search. Good amateur, but there are >1000 players in the world that are better.
And it is neither MCTS or a “simple tree search”, it uses PUCT, often calculating very deeply in a few lines.
International masters are emphatically not amateurs. Indeed, IMs are at the level where they can offer coaching services to amateur players, and reasonably expect to be paid something on the order of $100 per session. To elaborate on this point:
The total number of FIDE-rated chess players is over 500,000. The number of IMs, meanwhile, totals less than 3,000. IMs are quite literally in the 99th percentile of chess ability, and that’s actually being extremely restrictive with the population—there are many casual players who don’t have FIDE ratings at all, since only people who play in at least one FIDE-rated tournament will be assigned a rating.
I didn’t say anything about chess or shogi because I don’t recall any ablation for A0, I just remember the one in the AG0 paper for Go. The AG0 is definitely at or close to professional level and better than ‘good amateur’. And I would consider a non-distributed PUCT with no rollouts or other refinements to be a ‘simple tree search’: it doesn’t do any rollouts, and the depth is seriously limited by running on only a single machine w/4 TPUs with a few seconds for search: as the AG0 paper puts it, “Finally, it uses a simpler tree search that relies upon this single neural network to evaluate positions and sample moves, without performing any Monte-Carlo rollouts...we chose to use the simplest possible search algorithm”.