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One thing I wonder is why design of experiments (DOE) methodology is so seldom used for these things.

Statisticians and operations researchers have spent a hundred years deciding how to do as few experiments as possible to tweak parameters in the ways that give the highest impact with statistical basis that the selections are good.

In the language of information and decision trees, these experiments are trying to in some sense “branch” on the entropy minimizing variables.

Engines like Stockfish might have over 100 "search parameters" that need to be tuned, to my best knowledge SPSA is preferred because the computational cost typically does not depend on the number of parameters.

Or, if attempting to use SPSA to say, perform a final post-training tune to the last layers of a neural network, this could be thousands of parameters or more.

If you paid for MS FrontPage, you better get some value out of it!

as always, genius and insanity are only 1 step apart

This really reminds me of the web as I remember it from the mid-to-late 90's; I feel like I'm just a click away from the old deoxy.org, if anyone remembers that. (Don't go there now; the domain appears to have been long-ago hijacked.)

It gave me serious vibes of the old internet homepages of highly eccentric people that became a part of the internet folklore, whether in a good way or a bad way.

The video is probably the least bizarre thing there, if that's what you are warning about.

You probably meant definitely, but defiantly amusingly works too

"definitely" or "defiantly"?

The idea of something being "defiantly" NSFW gave me a chuckle.

Thanks! I've put that link in the toptext as well.

Her?

This is not true. Stockfish is not unbeatable by another engine, or another copy of Stockfish.

Chess engines have been impossible for humans to beat for well over a decade.

But a position in chess being solved is a specific thing, which is still very far from having happened for the starting position. Chess has been solved up to 7 pieces. Solving basically amounts to some absolutely massive tables that have every variation accounted for, so that you know whether a given position will end in a draw, black win or white win. (https://syzygy-tables.info)

You can run Stockfish single threaded in a deterministic manner by specifying nodes searched instead of time, so in principle it is possible to set some kind of bounty for beating Stockfish X at Y nodes per move from the start position, but I haven't seen anyone willing to actually do so.

Even by a stockfish running on a modern laptop with 2 minutes per move (provided they are going second)?!

“Solved” is a term of art. Defining it in some other way is not really wrong (since it is a definition) but it seems… unnecessary.

Curious, what has you believe that? As someone who doesn't know much about chess AI, I was mostly able to follow along, and figured there were simply some prereqs the author wasn't explaining (e.g. distillation, test-time search, RLVR). If the article is deeply confused in some way I would indeed like to calibrate my BS detectors.

This comment is another example of an "llm psychosis" that is currently occuring in common discourse.

The mass delusion of, "I don't understand what I'm reading, therefore it must be produced by an llm."

I think it's a pretty serious problem. Not that llm text exists on the internet, but that reasonable people are reflexively closed off to creativity because the mere existence of the possibility that something is created by an llm is in their minds grounds for disqualification.