We present SentiMATE, a novel end-to-end Deep Learning model for Chess, employing Natural Language Processing that aims to learn an effective evaluation function assessing move quality. This function is pre-trained on the sentiment of commentary associated with the training moves and is used to guide and optimize the agent's game-playing decision making. The contributions of this research are three-fold: we build and put forward both a classifier which extracts commentary describing the quality of Chess moves in vast commentary datasets, and a Sentiment Analysis model trained on Chess commentary to accurately predict the quality of said moves, to then use those predictions to evaluate the optimal next move of a Chess agent. Both classifiers achieve over 90 % classification accuracy. Lastly, we present a Chess engine, SentiMATE, which evaluates Chess moves based on a pre-trained sentiment evaluation function. Our results exhibit strong evidence to support our initial hypothesis - "Can Natural Language Processing be used to train a novel and sample efficient evaluation function in Chess Engines?" - as we integrate our evaluation function into modern Chess engines and play against agents with traditional Chess move evaluation functions, beating both random agents and a DeepChess implementation at a level-one search depth - representing the number of moves a traditional Chess agent (employing the alpha-beta search algorithm) looks ahead in order to evaluate a given chess state.
This report presents Giraffe, a chess engine that uses self-play to discover all its domain-specific knowledge, with minimal hand-crafted knowledge given by the programmer. Unlike previous attempts using machine learning only to perform parameter-tuning on hand-crafted evaluation functions, Giraffe's learning system also performs automatic feature extraction and pattern recognition. The trained evaluation function performs comparably to the evaluation functions of state-of-the-art chess engines - all of which containing thousands of lines of carefully hand-crafted pattern recognizers, tuned ov…
This work demonstrates that natural language transformers can support more generic strategic modeling, particularly for text-archived games. In addition to learning natural language skills, the abstract transformer architecture can generate meaningful moves on a chessboard. With further fine-tuning, the transformer learns complex gameplay by training on 2.8 million chess games in Portable Game Notation. After 30,000 training steps, OpenAI's Generative Pre-trained Transformer (GPT-2) optimizes weights for 774 million parameters. This fine-tuned Chess Transformer generates plausible strategies a…
The game of chess is the most widely-studied domain in the history of artificial intelligence. The strongest programs are based on a combination of sophisticated search techniques, domain-specific adaptations, and handcrafted evaluation functions that have been refined by human experts over several decades. In contrast, the AlphaGo Zero program recently achieved superhuman performance in the game of Go, by tabula rasa reinforcement learning from games of self-play. In this paper, we generalise this approach into a single AlphaZero algorithm that can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance…
We have seen numerous machine learning methods tackle the game of chess over the years. However, one common element in these works is the necessity of a finely optimized look ahead algorithm. The particular interest of this research lies with creating a chess engine that is highly capable, but restricted in its look ahead depth. We train a deep neural network to serve as a static evaluation function, which is accompanied by a relatively simple look ahead algorithm. We show that our static evaluation function has encoded some semblance of look ahead knowledge, and is comparable to classical eva…
Whiting School of Engineering, Johns Hopkins University（约翰斯·霍普金斯大学怀廷工程学院）
Representing a board game and its positions by text-based notation enables the possibility of NLP applications. Language models, can help gain insight into a variety of interesting problems such as unsupervised learning rules of a game, detecting player behavior patterns, player attribution, and ultimately learning the game to beat state of the art. In this study, we applied BERT models, first to the simple Nim game to analyze its performance in the presence of noise in a setup of a few-shot learning architecture. We analyzed the model performance via three virtual players, namely Nim Guru, Ra…
In this paper we present TDLeaf(lambda), a variation on the TD(lambda) algorithm that enables it to be used in conjunction with game-tree search. We present some experiments in which our chess program ``KnightCap'' used TDLeaf(lambda) to learn its evaluation function while playing on the Free Internet Chess Server (FICS, fics.onenet.net). The main success we report is that KnightCap improved from a 1650 rating to a 2150 rating in just 308 games and 3 days of play. As a reference, a rating of 1650 corresponds to about level B human play (on a scale from E (1000) to A (1800)), while 2150 is huma…
The idea of style transfer has largely only been explored in image-based tasks, which we attribute in part to the specific nature of loss functions used for style transfer. We propose a general formulation of style transfer as an extension of generative adversarial networks, by using a discriminator to regularize a generator with an otherwise separate loss function. We apply our approach to the task of learning to play chess in the style of a specific player, and present empirical evidence for the viability of our approach.
Deep neural networks have been successfully applied in learning the board games Go, chess and shogi without prior knowledge by making use of reinforcement learning. Although starting from zero knowledge has been shown to yield impressive results, it is associated with high computationally costs especially for complex games. With this paper, we present CrazyAra which is a neural network based engine solely trained in supervised manner for the chess variant crazyhouse. Crazyhouse is a game with a higher branching factor than chess and there is only limited data of lower quality available compare…
Crazyhouse is a chess variant that incorporates all of the classical chess rules, but allows users to drop pieces captured from the opponent as a normal move. Until 2018, all competitive computer engines for this board game made use of an alpha-beta pruning algorithm with a hand-crafted evaluation function for each position. Previous machine learning-based algorithms for just regular chess, such as NeuroChess and Giraffe, took hand-crafted evaluation features as input rather than a raw board representation. More recent projects, such as AlphaZero, reached massive success but required massive c…
University of Toronto（多伦多大学）；Microsoft Research（微软研究院）；Cornell University（康奈尔大学）
As artificial intelligence becomes increasingly intelligent---in some cases, achieving superhuman performance---there is growing potential for humans to learn from and collaborate with algorithms. However, the ways in which AI systems approach problems are often different from the ways people do, and thus may be uninterpretable and hard to learn from. A crucial step in bridging this gap between human and artificial intelligence is modeling the granular actions that constitute human behavior, rather than simply matching aggregate human performance. We pursue this goal in a model system with a l…
Norwegian University of Science and Technology（挪威科技大学）
Self-trained autonomous agents developed using machine learning are showing great promise in a variety of control settings, perhaps most remarkably in applications involving autonomous vehicles. The main challenge associated with self-learned agents in the form of deep neural networks, is their black-box nature: it is impossible for humans to interpret deep neural networks. Therefore, humans cannot directly interpret the actions of deep neural network based agents, or foresee their robustness in different scenarios. In this work, we demonstrate a method for probing which concepts self-learning…
Recent progress in reinforcement learning (RL) using self-game-play has shown remarkable performance on several board games (e.g., Chess and Go) as well as video games (e.g., Atari games and Dota2). It is plausible to consider that RL, starting from zero knowledge, might be able to gradually approximate a winning strategy after a certain amount of training. In this paper, we explore neural Monte-Carlo-Tree-Search (neural MCTS), an RL algorithm which has been applied successfully by DeepMind to play Go and Chess at a super-human level. We try to leverage the computational power of neural MCTS t…
Language models like OpenAI's Generative Pre-Trained Transformers (GPT-2/3) capture the long-term correlations needed to generate text in a variety of domains (such as language translators) and recently in gameplay (chess, Go, and checkers). The present research applies both the larger (GPT-3) and smaller (GPT-2) language models to explore the complex strategies for the game of Othello (or Reverses). Given the game rules for rapid reversals of fortune, the language model not only represents a candidate predictor of the next move based on previous game moves but also avoids sparse rewards in ga…
Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；University of Maryland（马里兰大学）
In this paper we demonstrate how genetic algorithms can be used to reverse engineer an evaluation function's parameters for computer chess. Our results show that using an appropriate expert (or mentor), we can evolve a program that is on par with top tournament-playing chess programs, outperforming a two-time World Computer Chess Champion. This performance gain is achieved by evolving a program that mimics the behavior of a superior expert. The resulting evaluation function of the evolved program consists of a much smaller number of parameters than the expert's. The extended experimental resul…
Bar-Ilan University（巴伊兰大学）；Center for Automation Research, University of Maryland（马里兰大学自动化研究中心）
In this paper we demonstrate how genetic algorithms can be used to reverse engineer an evaluation function's parameters for computer chess. Our results show that using an appropriate mentor, we can evolve a program that is on par with top tournament-playing chess programs, outperforming a two-time World Computer Chess Champion. This performance gain is achieved by evolving a program with a smaller number of parameters in its evaluation function to mimic the behavior of a superior mentor which uses a more extensive evaluation function. In principle, our mentor-assisted approach could be used in…
