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Limits RegistryAlphaZero generalized the AlphaGo Zero self-play approach to chess (and shogi), and in a December 2017 paper DeepMind reported that after just 9 hours of self-play training it defeated Stockfish 8 (then the strongest conventional chess engine) in a 100-game match, winning 28 games, drawing 72, and losing none, while evaluating vastly fewer positions per second than Stockfish's brute-force search. The result showed that a general-purpose self-play algorithm could surpass decades of hand-engineered chess-specific search heuristics.
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AlphaZero generalized the AlphaGo Zero self-play approach to chess (and shogi), and in a December 2017 paper DeepMind reported that after just 9 hours of self-play training it defeated Stockfish 8 (then the strongest conventional chess engine) in a 100-game match, winning 28 games, drawing 72, and losing none, while evaluating vastly fewer positions per second than Stockfish's brute-force search. The result showed that a general-purpose self-play algorithm could surpass decades of hand-engineered chess-specific search heuristics.
DeepMind's AlphaZero, trained from random play using only the rules of chess and 9 hours of self-play reinforcement learning with no opening books, endgame tables, or human game data, decisively defeated the 2016 world computer chess champion program Stockfish 8 in a 100-game match.
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Permanent ID limitsregistry.com/limits/LR-ALPHAZERO-STOCKFISH
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Limits Registry. LR-ALPHAZERO-STOCKFISH. AlphaZero defeats Stockfish in chess after hours of self-play. 2026.