sscg13

Hypothetically, what reward would be worth the cost for you to attempt to beat Stockfish 18, 100 million nodes/move, from the starting position?

You can run Stockfish single threaded in a deterministic manner by specifying nodes searched instead of time, so in principle it is possible to set some kind of bounty for beating Stockfish X at Y nodes per move from the start position, but I haven't seen anyone willing to actually do so.

However, it is true that Elo gain on "balanced books" has stalled somewhat since Stockfish 16 in 2023, which is also reflected on the CCRL rating lists.

IMO AlphaZero was partially a result of the fact that using more compute also works. Stockfish 10 running on 4x as many CPUs would beat Stockfish 8 by a larger margin than AlphaZero did. To this day, nobody has determined what a "fair" GPU to CPU comparison is.

Engines like Stockfish might have over 100 "search parameters" that need to be tuned, to my best knowledge SPSA is preferred because the computational cost typically does not depend on the number of parameters.

Or, if attempting to use SPSA to say, perform a final post-training tune to the last layers of a neural network, this could be thousands of parameters or more.

Leela policy is around 2600 elo, or around the level of a strong grandmaster. Note that Go is different from chess since there are no draws, so skill difference is greatly magnified. Elo is always a relative scale (expected score is based on elo difference) so multiplication should not really make sense anyways.