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”One major facet of the tournament format was that there were no opening books”

Code and data are equivalent (for example, instead of an opening book that says “if you play white, open with pawn E4” one could have an evaluation function that says “after the first move of white, having a pawn on E4 is worth a million points”), so how did they enforce that rule?

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Hardcoding an opening would be considered playing with an opening book.

Regarding the enforcement of this rule: As all chess engines that competed are pretty well known (and sometimes even open source), I'm pretty sure that they (rightfully) trust the programmers not to do anything against the rules.

I wonder if someone were to come up with an neural network based, AlphaGo-style engine that was competitive with these other top engines, how they'd deal with these sort of rules. An "opening book" of sorts would likely be baked into the neural nets, unable to be turned on or off.

AlphaGo, for example, has definitely played well-known human openings (and innovated on them) despite having no opening book.

All these top chess engines definitely play well-known human openings and innovate on them, they just happen to be the best sequences of moves in certain situations (as far as we know)

The rule is against "explicit" hardcoded opening books, to force the engines to calculate the best move each time, to encourage variation and (I think) to allow the developers to focus on building stronger engines instead of managing huge opening books.

The encourage variation part didn't really succeed in this format, as they all tend to converge to the same openings

It's sort of funny to consider that our opening books are the product of several hundred years of incredibly slow, inefficient Monte Carlo tree search done by humans playing over wooden boards. Seems odd to deny that to engines that can knock it all out in a weekend anyway.

This isn't true, though. There are a lot of openings where the humans turn out to be right anyway, even though the computer thinks it's found a marginally better move. Humans have a better intuitive understanding of how certain openings create endgame possibilities, and if I remember correctly the combination of a Super GM and an engine is still markedly stronger than an engine alone.

Engines have contributed substantially to modern opening books but they haven't supplanted the existing knowledge. Humans turned out to be wrong about many sharp lines (which were refuted by computer) and the computer can find really interesting ideas in many positions (which would be nearly impossible for a human to find) but the old human-approved Best Openings are still standing tall after the engine revolution.

> I remember correctly the combination of a Super GM and an engine is still markedly stronger than an engine alone.

This may have been true when engines were still only marginally stronger than humans, but I haven't seen any evidence that is currently true. A few years ago Nakamura + Rybka (previous best program) lost to Stockfish.

At the time Rybka was not one of the strongest engines anymore, and "correspondence chess" (human + computers) is still played.

The strongest players are not GMs, as far as I know, and a very important part of those games is trying to force positions where the opponent's engine might make a slight mistake

Here is an interview with the world champion https://en.chessbase.com/post/better-than-an-engine-leonardo...

Do you know of any evidence that these players+engines can beat engines alone, instead of each other?

I can certainly accept that it'll always be the case that computer recommendations don't necessarily chime with human abilities and play style, and so accepting engine recommendations could be detrimental to human results. Beyond that, I'd be intrigued to see the numbers on the types of positions where engine evaluations diverge wildly from results if they're left to play out a position thousands of times. I heard this about the French Defence recently, for example, but without any real evidence.

Anyway, I was just making a slightly facetious point that all our existing openings came about by a slow, semi-random process in which people tried moves, played out the games, and then looked at the results.

I really disagree with the "random" part, though. Human openings need to at least have some "theory" around them to know what to do if your opponent diverges from the main lines.

Usually "real evidence" that the human choices sometimes are better than the machine ones is that the engines after a long time agree with the human choices.

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