GCP: They've been shifting as the community has continued to provide computing resources (and enthusiasm!). Originally I just wanted to demonstrate that Alpha Zero could be replicated by a distributed effort and see if their results were reproducible. After that, I was really happy when it surpassed the regular Leela (and a bit later, all other public programs), which made me feel good as there was now really something to show for all the people who had contributed their computer time. Then beating a professional, and eventually surpassing humans altogether. I'm sure we've reached that point now. Strength-wise the only reason to continue much further now is to create some margin and get the same level on mobile phones.
By making everything free, it also provides a lower baseline for the public availability of good software and data. I can't say exactly how Leela Zero influenced things, but at least the TensorFlow team at Google, Facebook's PyTorch team and Tencent (to some extent) have now open sourced their Go efforts. Ironically only the original DeepMind team did not do so. Facebook's effort followed Leela Zero rather closely and their results gave us some good insight of where we'd end up. We were able to make some changes to improve performance when playing against a handicap based on seeing the weaknesses of their result.
EGN: Have you been able to make money from Leela Zero?
GCP: No. But I think it has made a lot of Go players happy.
EGN: Post AlphaGo, do you think that the work involved in Computer Go will retain its interest to developers? Or will it become a stale area?
GCP: It's hard to say. Computer chess had some decent years after Deep Blue. It's not because an IBM mainframe can beat the World Champion that this helps the players at home. It took some time before PC software was clearly stronger than humans. With Go things went fast though. Leela Zero already beats strong professionals on a home desktop. There are a few things to address such as playing better with handicap, different komi and maybe even Japanese rules. As long as there is a market, you will find developers. But for researchers, it's probably more fun to push the boundary at something that computers are still bad at, than pushing it even further past human limits.
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EGN：Leela Zero的目标是什么？
围棋棋友的福气。 作者: lu01 时间: 2018-6-2 20:02
EGN: Do you actually play go yourself? I guess that the audience is bound to want to know your rank!
GCP: I last played Go almost 20 years ago. I played for some months in a club while I was a student but got distracted by other interests. I never had a real rank but my strength must have been about 15-20 kyu or so. Obviously, this is no hindrance for making a strong computer program. When developing visions systems for self-driving cars, nobody is asking for engineers with 20/20 vision either.
EGN: Are you interested in other strategy games, or do your hobbies lie elsewhere?
GCP: I started playing chess competitively again end of last year after one of my daughters asked me to teach her the game and I realized that they are old enough that I can afford to have such hobbies again :-)
EGN: For the non-experts out there, can you explain what the essential difference between Leela and LeelaZero is?
GCP: Leela has been trained on games from strong human players, and has quite some (human) knowledge and heuristics about the game programmed into it. She uses a combination of neural networks and Monte Carlo playouts. Leela Zero only knows the basic rules, nothing more, and only uses a neural network with no Monte Carlo simulations.
EGN: Were you surprised by the interest of LeelaZero generated?
GCP: Yes, very much. Based on the amount of contribution Stockfish's distributed testing effort gets, and the comparatively much larger amount of chess players in the west, I estimated we would get perhaps 10 or so computer go enthusiasts to run the client. In fact it's been generally over 500! Similarly there have been some very high quality code contributions as well.
EGN: Already a lot of projects are starting to make use of LeelaZero. I have seen Lizzie, SabakiLeela, and Iceelz. Do you have an idea yourself for a future teaching tool linked to Leela?
GCP: I will leave this to others as it's not so much fun for me. There is a basic GUI for the regular Leela out of necessity - many people that are less confident around computers would have big problems to download and install a separate engine and GUI, and I wanted to help them. At some point it will be upgraded to Leela Zero. I would be happy to just have a good game analysis GUI that handles variations well, with some kind of fuseki/joseki database and with a strong engine backing it, as chess players have had and used as their workhorse for decades. I hope that having open sourced Leela Zero accomplishes this. I also made the resulting networks and data public domain. If someone makes something really nice based on it and wants to charge money for their work, they can do so.