Post
3479
I added recurrent depth, a gated memory, and Squeeze-and-Excitation to a chess network with no search. Same one forward pass, no tree — a deeper claim about what three architectural changes buy together.
Confirmed on three independent seeds at 1.38M games. Then, extending it, I found two bugs in my own protocol: cudnn.benchmark=True was silently undoing my determinism seed, and a comparison's random seed was derived from the model path being tested — two checkpoints played different openings against the same opponent. Both fixed, nine already-run matches discarded and rerun.
Only then did I extend one seed across 8.8x more data. Four instruments, and they don't agree: puzzles ahead 8/8, Maia ahead 23/24, a 91-pair round-robin (27,300 games) ahead 7/7 — all single-pass, no search. Minimax, the one opponent that actually searches: ahead on only 4/8, no stable direction, every swing confirmed on a second draw before I believed it.
The lesson isn't "it works." It's that an opponent that searches gives a different verdict than one that doesn't — and the two bugs that could have hidden that were caught by rules written before this run, not by anything clever during it.
Every number, including the ones minimax contradicts 👇
🤗 RDTvlokip/RDTChess
💻 https://github.com/RDTvlokip/RDTChess
♟️ https://lichess.org/@/RDTChessBot
Confirmed on three independent seeds at 1.38M games. Then, extending it, I found two bugs in my own protocol: cudnn.benchmark=True was silently undoing my determinism seed, and a comparison's random seed was derived from the model path being tested — two checkpoints played different openings against the same opponent. Both fixed, nine already-run matches discarded and rerun.
Only then did I extend one seed across 8.8x more data. Four instruments, and they don't agree: puzzles ahead 8/8, Maia ahead 23/24, a 91-pair round-robin (27,300 games) ahead 7/7 — all single-pass, no search. Minimax, the one opponent that actually searches: ahead on only 4/8, no stable direction, every swing confirmed on a second draw before I believed it.
The lesson isn't "it works." It's that an opponent that searches gives a different verdict than one that doesn't — and the two bugs that could have hidden that were caught by rules written before this run, not by anything clever during it.
Every number, including the ones minimax contradicts 👇
🤗 RDTvlokip/RDTChess
💻 https://github.com/RDTvlokip/RDTChess
♟️ https://lichess.org/@/RDTChessBot
