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1anaguma
That’s a good point, it could be consensus.
6gwern
This is at best over-simplified in terms of thinking about 'search': Magnus Carlsen would also beat you or an amateur at bullet chess, at any time control:
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(See for example the forward-pass-only Elos of chess/Go agents; Jones 2021 includes scaling law work on predicting the zero-search strength of agents, with no apparent upper bound.)
I think the natural counterpoint here is that the policy network could still be construed as doing search; just thst all the compute was invested during training and amortised later across many inferences.
Magnus Carlsen is better than average players for a couple reasons
- Better “evaluation”; the ability to look at a position and accurately estimate likelihood of winning given optimal play
- Better “search”; a combination of heuristic shortcuts and raw calculation power that let him see further ahead
So I agree that search isn’t the only relevant dimension.... (read more)