1. The Start

2024-01-14

AlphaZeroPlusPlus

Objective: To train an RL system to play chess at ~1200 elo from scratch.

(How hard is it, really? Can it even be done on my home PC?)

Todo: Details and history.

Previous attempts

Previous attempts failed because of:

  • Trying RL even before SL
  • Slow iteration speed
  • No tracking of progress
  • Not looking for help when stuck
  • No experimentation framework
  • No observability into the data/model
  • Not being in a presentable state
  • Trying a lot of things but not thinking mathematically
  • No Unit Tests! (Or any tests at all!)

New attempt

We're gonna start from scratch again.

This time we will:

  • Optimise iteration time
    • Start with small neural nets for fast training
    • Optimise algorithm for execution speed
  • Do SL before RL
  • Track progress on this blog
  • Look up books/articles/papers etc for help when stuck
  • Develop an experimentation and observability framework
  • Visualise the models and data at every step
  • Spend some time making it presentable
  • Thinking more analytically about the problem before experimenting with code
  • Write unit tests!