Human Like Chess Engine

Deep Reinforcement Learning

Reinforcement Learning Agents

Abstract

We used supervised training to create a series of chess engines based on humans play at different levels of skill. We compared them to other engines and to human players and found that self-play trained engines would sometimes behave more human-like than the supervised ones, although we believe this may be due to improper hyperparameter selection. The three methods we used for comparing to humans present a novel set of tools for evaluating human-like behaviour in complex reinforcement learning systems and hope to develop them further.

Goal

To make the chess engine that acts more like a human, through supervised training and modification of it’s risk sensitivity

Reinforcement Learning Chess Engines

  • AlphaZero - Neural Network that evaluates on it’s own, and uses the network to do a tree search based on Predictive + Upper Bound Tree Search (modification of UCB 1).
  • AlphaZero has been reimplemented in the open source Leela Chess project

Supervised Training

  • All games from database.lichess.org
  • Using 432,335,939 games as a training set extracted games between similar ELO players
  • 22,971,939 as a holdout for later use used ranges of 100 to segregate the training data
  • During training 10% was held out to get a training error
  • Training error quickly converged to 30% on all runs, while MSE slowly decreased
Karthik Bhaskar
Karthik Bhaskar
Machine Learning Researcher | Data Scientist | Software Engineer

Machine Learning Researcher | Software Engineer | Vector Institute | University of Toronto | University Health Network

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