Yoav Golderg, February 2024.
Researchers at Google DeepMind released a paper about a learned systems that is able to play blitz-chess at a grandmaster level, without using search. This is interesting and imagination-capturing, because up to now computer-chess systems that play at this level, either based on machine-learning or not, did use a search component.[^1]
Indeed, my first reaction when reading the paper was to tweet wow, crazy and interesting. I still find it crazy and interesting, but upon a closer read, it may not be as crazy and as interesting as I initially thought. Many reactions on twitter, reddit, etc, were super-impressed, going into implications about projected learning abilities of AI systems, the ability of neural networks to learn semantics from observations, etc, which are really over-the-top. The paper does not claim any of them, but they are still perceiv