spawkfish

Training different policies in different styles is a really interesting idea. You could then have a gating process that first chooses the "style" of move to make and then uses the style-specific network to select a move.

I think getting data for this could be difficult though. I wonder how easy it would be to automatically categorize a game record by "style"?

Thanks for the tip :) I read this thesis when I started spawkfish, and it's very nice work.

Yes that is correct, and being tricked into draw by repetition is one of his current weaknesses :)

Oh, absolutely. The project is still in very early stages right now, so a lot of important pieces are still missing.

Thanks!

Right now I have just about as close to an "extreme type C" engine as possible. There is a neural network that maps from a board position directly to a ranked list of moves it wants to make., and a little bit of logic on top of that to reject illegal moves.

The recognition of wins/draws/losses is actually done in a layer around the engine, which doesn't understand these things yet. One of "tricks" it is vulnerable to right now is being forced into a draw by repetition, because doesn't know that is a thing to avoid.

Adding a more traditional search (augmented by the network, of course) is on my todo list, and I think it will improve the playing strength a lot. I am pleasantly surprised though, at how well it plays without any of that.

Thanks for your feedback!

I've noticed it making quite a few errors like the one you mention. I think that a little bit of search (say just one or two ply) will help a lot with avoiding this kind of mistake, because the network seems very good at recognizing when a piece is in trouble if you show it the position.

Hello, I'm the creator of spawkfish :)

The project is still in pretty early stages, so don't expect it won't take down any strong chess players yet, but I'm hoping that with a bit of effort it will be possible for neural networks to do for chess what they have recently done for Go.