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Concepts Discovered by AlphaZero

I mean, it doesn't take a lot. You just have to be a weird contrarian and think from zeroth principles.
How to be weird? Choose an attribute, a trait, and invest in it. Create an abundance of it in yourself.
How to be a contrarian? Be ok with being wrong, a lot. Then start being wrong more often.
How to think from zeroth principles? Keep asking why, until you understand the universe.

There's High-Level and Low-Level Concepts.
The importance of the center is a rather high-level concept.
Low-Level concepts are the board, the rules, existence, a square, colors of pieces and squares, piece position.

Capablanca advised studying chess in cycles. Endgame, Opening, Middlegame, Repeat.
You can do the same for the Level of Concepts, low-level, high-level, mid-level, repeat.

The important thing is to understand the balance of theory and practice.
Some people hate to lose, they become theoreticians.
Some people hate to study, they become pragmatic.

You need some integrative complexity, to embrace both sides, and find the right balance.

How to find the right balance? Keep dancing back and forth. More theory, more practice, less theory, less practice.

The easiest way to learn is to move up and down simultaneously.
Take a concept and see if you can find a concept it builds on top of.
Then try to find a concept that builds on top of the initial concept.

The fundamental root of long-term mistakes is a lack of learning.
The root of short-term mistakes is progress, a desire to learn.

Learning takes clarity and understanding of time(cause and effect).
Pre-learning action and different, improved post-learning action.

The reason to learn is to think, and thus, act differently next time you encounter a situation.
In the days when Sussman was a novice, Minsky once came to him as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

"What are you doing?", asked Minsky.

"I am training a randomly wired neural net to play Tic-Tac-Toe" Sussman replied.

"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky.

"I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said.

Minsky then shut his eyes.

"Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher.

"So that the room will be empty."

At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
Hello,

Could someone explain the graph ? weight, w, ph, eg, 23, 19...

Thanks a lot !
@Soragan said in #4:
> Hello,
>
> Could someone explain the graph ? weight, w, ph, eg, 23, 19...
>
> Thanks a lot !

Weight is the strength of the connection
w means that it's for white (so in this case a space advantage for white)
ph means phased which is a mixture between middlegame and endgame values
eg means endgame
the numbers refer to the depth of the layer in which the concept is present

There is a lot more information about all these details in the paper, if you want to dive into it.
It's a pity this was done with chess rather than shogi, since chess tactics tend to overwhelm strategic/positional play and I am curious what strategic concepts could be discovered in shogi.
I m not sure I understand the incoming and outgoing edge... The incoming edge is like the plan and the outgoing is the consequences ?
And the red color, it's a strong relation with the others concept and the blue color is a weak relation ?
(I read the paper, but... ^^')
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@MishaZagreb said in #2:
> There's High-Level and Low-Level Concepts.
> The importance of the center is a rather high-level concept.
> Low-Level concepts are the board, the rules, existence, a square, colors of pieces and squares, piece position.
>
> Capablanca advised studying chess in cycles. Endgame, Opening, Middlegame, Repeat.
> You can do the same for the Level of Concepts, low-level, high-level, mid-level, repeat.

All agreed there. And glad to see this.

> Some people hate to lose, they become theoreticians.
> Some people hate to study, they become pragmatic.

Is that a theory of the type: There are 2 types of people in the world. There are bins missing there :)

I mostly agree with the human side of the chess concepts acquisition and considering that as part of the learning problem, and that the magic sauce of task or problem nature scheduling through our minds real life, is to be flexible and adaptive at all scales, and not only about the board, but about our own disposition and evolution about the board.

There are some sentences of wisdom about learning, though, that are not as informative. But this is not an encyclopedia, we try our best to share.

So for the human learning reminders (they should be so) I fully find resonance with your comment.
But here is how I consider that the blog (or article purpose) is not to tell how we learn, but how it learned.

And as a model inspired by invariant structures of animal biology, how they (the A0 experiments) can suggest hypotheses to further our understanding of chess internal models in humans.

Next post for the conference. to be continued, three.
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