AlphaZero has been very successful in many games. Unfortunately, it still consumes a huge amount of computing resources, the majority of which is spent in self-play. Hyperparameter tuning exacerbates the training cost since each hyperparameter configuration requires its own time to train one run, during which it will generate its own self-play records. As a result, multiple runs are usually needed for different hyperparameter configurations. This paper proposes using population based training (PBT) to help tune hyperparameters dynamically and improve strength during training time. Another significant advantage is that this method requires a single run only, while incurring a small additional time cost, since the time for generating self-play records remains unchanged though the time for optimization is increased following the AlphaZero training algorithm. In our experiments for 9x9 Go, the PBT method is able to achieve a higher win rate for 9x9 Go than the baselines, each with its own hyperparameter configuration and trained individually. For 19x19 Go, with PBT, we are able to obtain improvements in playing strength. Specifically, the PBT agent can obtain up to 74% win rate against ELF OpenGo, an open-source state-of-the-art AlphaZero program using a neural network of a comparable capacity. This is compared to a saturated non-PBT agent, which achieves a win rate of 47% against ELF OpenGo under the same circumstances.

Researchers from all over the world contribute to this repository as a prelude to the peer review process for publication in traditional journals. We hope to save you some time by picking out articles that represent the most promise for the typical data scientist. The articles listed below represent a fraction of all articles appearing on the preprint server. They are listed in no particular order with a link to each paper along with a brief overview. Especially relevant articles are marked with a "thumbs up" icon.

The AlphaGo, AlphaGo Zero, and AlphaZero series of algorithms are a remarkable demonstration of deep reinforcement learning's capabilities, achieving superhuman performance in the complex game of Go with progressively increasing autonomy. However, many obstacles remain in the understanding of and usability of these promising approaches by the research community. Toward elucidating unresolved mysteries and facilitating future research, we propose ELF OpenGo, an open-source reimplementation of the AlphaZero algorithm. ELF OpenGo is the first open-source Go AI to convincingly demonstrate superhuman performance with a perfect (20:0) record against global top professionals. We apply ELF OpenGo to conduct extensive ablation studies, and to identify and analyze numerous interesting phenomena in both the model training and in the gameplay inference procedures. Our code, models, selfplay datasets, and auxiliary data are publicly available.

This paper presents a semantic brain computer interface (BCI) agent with particle swarm optimization (PSO) based on a Fuzzy Markup Language (FML) for Go learning and prediction applications. Additionally, we also establish an Open Go Darkforest (OGD) cloud platform with Facebook AI research (FAIR) open source Darkforest and ELF OpenGo AI bots. The Japanese robot Palro will simultaneously predict the move advantage in the board game Go to the Go players for reference or learning. The proposed semantic BCI agent operates efficiently by the human-based BCI data from their brain waves and machine-based game data from the prediction of the OGD cloud platform for optimizing the parameters between humans and machines. Experimental results show that the proposed human and smart machine co-learning mechanism performs favorably. We hope to provide students with a better online learning environment, combining different kinds of handheld devices, robots, or computer equipment, to achieve a desired and intellectual learning goal in the future.

Today, Facebook AI Research (FAIR) open sourced ELF OpenGo, an AI bot that has defeated world champion professional Go players, based on our existing ELF platform for Reinforcement Learning Research. We are releasing both the trained model and the code used to create it. Inspired by DeepMind's work, we kicked off an effort earlier this year to reproduce their recent AlphaGoZero results using FAIR's Extensible, Lightweight Framework (ELF) for reinforcement learning research. The goal was to create an open source implementation of a system that would teach itself how to play Go at the level of a professional human player or better. By releasing our code and models we hoped to inspire others to think about new applications and research directions for this technology.