He has authored several highly acclaimed books on chess and has been writing the famous ‘Sadler on Books’ column for New In Chess magazine for many years. Matthew Sadler (1974) is a Grandmaster who twice won the British Championship and was awarded an individual Gold Medal at the 1996 Olympiad. With a foreword by former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov and an introduction by DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis.
Not just in solving games, but in providing solutions for a wide variety of challenges in society. Game Changer offers intriguing insights into the opportunities and horizons of Artificial Intelligence. The story of AlphaZero has a wider impact. Both professionals and club players will improve their game by studying AlphaZero’s stunning discoveries in every field that matters: opening preparation, piece mobility, initiative, attacking techniques, long-term sacrifices and much more. Game Changer also presents a collection of lucidly explained chess games of astonishing quality. Sadler and Regan reveal its thinking process and tell the story of the human motivation and the techniques that created AlphaZero. They also had unparalleled access to its team of developers and were offered a unique look ‘under the bonnet’ to grasp the depth and breadth of AlphaZero’s search. The selection of ten games published in December 2017 created a worldwide sensation: how was it possible to play in such a brilliant and risky style and not lose a single game against an opponent of superhuman strength?įor Game Changer, Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan investigated more than two thousand previously unpublished games by AlphaZero. The artificial intelligence system, created by DeepMind, had been fed nothing but the rules of the Royal Game when it beat the world’s strongest chess engine in a prolonged match. The selection of ten games published in December 2017 created a worldwide sensation: how was It took AlphaZero only a few hours of self-learning to become the chess player that shocked the world. This is, however, where some fuzzy pattern matching is required because you won't neccessarily get the exact same positions described in the books.It took AlphaZero only a few hours of self-learning to become the chess player that shocked the world. In addition a strong player needs to be familiar with a large number of tactical patterns and strategical positions. Unless you are extremely talented, you'll most likely never achieve a position where you might hope to gain the upper hand by intelligence only. If your opponent knows exactly what they are doing in the opening phase and you don't, you are at a great disadvantage.
A strong player needs to know a huge number of openings.
The decision how good or bad a position is involves a lot more than material count.Īs for playing by the book (computers use databases for openings) it is the same thing with human players. I've even seen a program with a particular mode where it would make intentionally weak moves occasionally, let you know of that and then tell you after your move whether you managed to take advantage of it.Ī lot of intelligence comes from position evaluation. And for human players, chess programs let you set the playing strenght - noone likes to lose all the time.
Chess programs are technically beatable alright, since chess cannot be solved to the end (yet). I don't however believe that the term "unbeatable AI" is quite correct.