H. G. Muller wrote on Fri, Dec 15, 2017 10:08 AM UTC:
Note that AlphaZero is not just a neural network. It is a tree search guided by a NN, the NN being also used for evaluation in the leaf nodes. The tactical abilities are mainly dependent on the search. The NN is just good at deciding which positions require further search to resolve the tactics.
It is certainly true that more complex games need larger search trees to resolve their tactics, and that larger boards with more pieces will also require larger width of the NN to interpret the position. All of this increases the required computing power. But humans suffer from larger complexity too. So AlphaZero might not get nearly as close to perfect play in a complex war game as it can in a simple game like Chess. But it is not possible to draw any conclusions from that o how it will fare against strong human opponents. The way it 'thinks' is actually quite close to how humans approach such games. So you would expect it to suffer equally as human opponents. Then it just matters who has the most computing power. In Chess AlphaZero was examining 80,000 positions per second, which is far more than any human could do.
Note that AlphaZero is not just a neural network. It is a tree search guided by a NN, the NN being also used for evaluation in the leaf nodes. The tactical abilities are mainly dependent on the search. The NN is just good at deciding which positions require further search to resolve the tactics.
It is certainly true that more complex games need larger search trees to resolve their tactics, and that larger boards with more pieces will also require larger width of the NN to interpret the position. All of this increases the required computing power. But humans suffer from larger complexity too. So AlphaZero might not get nearly as close to perfect play in a complex war game as it can in a simple game like Chess. But it is not possible to draw any conclusions from that o how it will fare against strong human opponents. The way it 'thinks' is actually quite close to how humans approach such games. So you would expect it to suffer equally as human opponents. Then it just matters who has the most computing power. In Chess AlphaZero was examining 80,000 positions per second, which is far more than any human could do.