u/jboyml

Did something similar before where we trained BERT to predict which Swedish political party wrote a text. We used all historical bills which are publicly available (https://data.riksdagen.se/). Perhaps there's something similar for your use case?

You can also watch GMs play lower-rated players with queen odds and still win easily because most people just blunder everything away. Or Hikaru get to 3000 with the Bongcloud even though it's objectively a terrible opening. Of course openings shouldn't be ignored, but most people <2000 don't need anything more than the absolute basics (and learning from mistakes)

Check out the ChessDojo Discord! Fantastic community with many players willing to play longer time controls. There are also regular tournaments, for example there's currently a classical tournament running at 90|30 time controls with one game per week. Late joiners are welcome.

In Aagaard's book "Calculation", he writes:

I remember about a decade ago that more than half of the players in the top 100 had at one time worked with Mark, although some of them did so only fleetingly.

Quite impressive!

500 points in 2 months would indeed be great progress, but looking at your Lichess profile it looks like your lowest rating was 1539 on November 20 and you just reached 2000. That'd be 500 points in five months, not two? Two months ago your rapid rating was already almost 1900.

EDIT: To clarify, I think that 500 points in five months is also fantastic progress. I just don't understand where two months comes from.

I have the exact same desire. My approach from now on will be to play long games in blindfold mode with a real board and do all my studying (such as puzzles) on a real board. As for long games, I can really recommend joining the Chessdojo Discord. There are tournaments with long time controls quite often. For example, I'm participating in a 90/30 classical tournament.

Best of luck!

What does it mean for a model to understand what it outputs? What would prove understanding? It seems to me you'd need something like general intelligence (whatever that means) for that.

You can just download the PGN and put it in Lichess for free. There's also the study function which is amazing for analysing and annotating your games, which is arguably one of the most important things to improve your game.

I bought the diamond membership and while I really enjoyed the lessons to get started, I've since come to use other sites for almost everything other than playing. I prefer Lichess and Chesstempo for analysis and puzzles respectively. If you have limited money to spend, I'd recommend getting Chesstempo premium and a couple of good chess books instead.

I agree that it is important to have somewhat realistic expectations. But I also feel like this goes too far sometimes and the result is people thinking that it is impossible to improve considerably unless you're a genius 7-year old, when the truth is that anyone can improve if you really put in the work (which admittedly is hard when you have lots of responsibilities in life!)

If you really want to improve rapidly you must commit to some serious study. At your level, most of your time should consist of playing games (as long as possible, 15|10 is great), analyzing the games (without an engine!) and doing tactics. For tactics, ChessTempo is great and I can also recommend this video by David Pruess. Other than that, you need to identify your weaknesses. For example, if you tend to lose winning endgames you should study the endgame.

As far as books go, I think that Best Lessons of a Chess Coach by Sunil Weeramantry (Hikaru's stepfather, btw!) is really good and definitely doable at your level.

Of course, playing for fun and not taking it too seriously is great as well, but it sounds like you want to improve.

Definitely a sad tweet, but probably not in the sense Nepo meant.

Du kan ju fortsätta ditt argument. Jämlika förutsättningar inför den obligatoriska förskolan vid 5-års ålder gynnar samtliga partier, så förskolan borde bli obligatorisk.

Yeah, this is clearly just a trivial application of the results in Jürgen's master's thesis from 1987.

No one is really taking a stance against papers just benchmarking their algorithm in MuJoCo environments, practically all RL papers do, we just don't think it's a good idea to establish a new benchmark that requires MuJoCo and thus further ingrain MuJoCo in the community.

The title literally says the paper proposes a benchmark. It's hard to make that more clear without making the title excessively long. And I would expect people interested in ML research to be able to actually read past the title and click the link before they start contributing to the discussion. You don't even have to read the paper abstract, you can just look at its title and the purpose of the paper becomes very clear.

Wow, I didn't know that. That's absolutely terrible. Here's the relevant quote from the article:

MuJoCo was developed to enable our research in model-based control. The experience so far indicates that it is a very useful and widely applicable tool, that can accelerate progress in robotic control. Thus we have decided to make it publicly available. It will be free for non-profit research.

I had some sympathy for the MuJoCo developers previously, of course they should have the right to charge for their work, but this certainly changes my perspective...

Oh, so you're saying it is possible to construct benchmarks without relying on expensive commercial software? We should try that!

It's different because there are no good alternatives to GPUs, but there are good alternative simulators, so why should a standard benchmark rely on MuJoCo? The $1000 spent on MuJoCo over two years could instead be spent on a nice GPU and that can make a difference for many people.

It's different because there are no competitive "open-source GPUs" and it is much more difficult to get there without heavily hindering research. In contrast, replacing MuJoCo wouldn't be that hard if the community decided that we should avoid commercial software when good alternatives exist (and will improve with use.)

It seems unfair to label this as just "their own private crusade". I agree that it's not obvious that this warrants rejection, but it's something that affects the whole community and definitely something that needs to be discussed.

I agree that we really need to move past MuJoCo and start benchmarking using open-source simulators. People argue that it is free for students so it's no big deal, but the license is locked to a single computer which is really annoying.

Imagine if TensorFlow and PyTorch cost $500 a year and if you couldn't afford that, you had to use Theano. Of course, all the cool papers only provide code for PyTorch. That's basically the situation in RL. Except it's worse, because even if you can reimplement stuff in PyBullet or whatever you can't easily compare results with other papers.

AlphaZero is quite simple IMO and that's part of the beauty.

Wow, tusen miljarder nanowatt!

I’m not really sure how an eventual 1 trillion param model would contribute to the general knowledge of the world (i.e. purpose of research), but I’m not in NLP (or marketing).

Research results don't have to be usable by everyone. The LHC cost billions of dollars to build. Expensive equipment is the norm in many sciences. Why would ML, especially if we're talking about approaching AGI, be so different?