Giraffe

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Giraffe, an experimental open source chess engine by Matthew Lai under the GNU General Public License, compliant to the Chess Engine Communication Protocol, written in C++11 and based on deep learning, which is topic of Matthew's master's thesis in August 2015. Giraffe uses the Eigen linear algebra library, and Pradyumna Kannan's magic move generator. As employee of Google DeepMind, Matthew Lai announced the discontinuation of the Giraffe project in January 2016.

=Description= Giraffe's evaluation function is a deep neural network trained by TDLeaf. Its feature representation includes a map of static exchange evaluations for all squares and sides, a structure already proposed by Russell M. Church and Kenneth W. Church in Plans, Goals, and Search Strategies for the Selection of a Move in Chess. Probability-based evaluation scores are not in centipawns nor linear to material, and span a +-10,000 range, with mate scores of +- 30,000. The search recently changed from traditional depth-based iterative deepening to assigning number of nodes (or time) to child nodes. Node budget allocation will also become neural network based.

=See also=
 * Morph
 * NeuroChess

=Publications=
 * Matthew Lai (2015). Giraffe: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Chess. M.Sc. thesis, Imperial College London, arXiv:1509.01549v1
 * Jonathan Rosenthal (2016). Deep Learning for Go. B.Sc. thesis, ETH Zurich

=Forum Posts=

2015

 * *First release* Giraffe, a new engine based on deep learning by Matthew Lai, CCC, July 08, 2015
 * SEE Map by Matthew Lai, CCC, July 20, 2015 » Static Exchange Evaluation
 * Time assignment to children by Matthew Lai, CCC, July 26, 2015
 * Giraffe 20150801 by Matthew Lai, CCC, August 01, 2015
 * Giraffe, new release (Aug 17) by Matthew Lai, CCC, August 17, 2015
 * New Giraffe (Aug 28) by Matthew Lai, CCC, August 28, 2015
 * Giraffe dissertation, and now open source by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 08, 2015
 * New Giraffe (Sept 8) by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 08, 2015

2016

 * Death of Giraffe, but hopefully not ML in chess! by Matthew Lai, CCC, January 21, 2016
 * Re: Deep Learning Chess Engine ? by Matthew Lai, CCC, August 04, 2016
 * Beginner's guide to graphical profiling by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 10, 2016 » Profiling
 * New Giraffe by Matthew Lai, CCC, October 23, 2016

2017...

 * Is AlphaGo approach unsuitable to chess? by Mel Cooper, CCC, May 27, 2017 » AlphaGo, Deep Learning
 * Re: Is AlphaGo approach unsuitable to chess? by Peter Österlund, CCC, May 31, 2017 » Texel


 * Re: Why is it so hard for comps to play like people? by Ben Redic, Hiarcs Forum, June 03, 2017
 * Giraffe on Threadripper + newest GPUs by John Margusen, CCC, August 19, 2017
 * Re: Alphazero news by Matthew Lai, CCC, December 07, 2018 » AlphaZero

=External Links=

Chess Engine

 * GitHub - ianfab/Giraffe: experimental chess engine based on temporal-difference reinforcement learning hosted by Fabian Fichter
 * waterreaction / Giraffe — Bitbucket (Wayback Machine, July 13, 2017)
 * This Chess Engine Learns How to Beat Humans by Playing Against Itself by Rollin Bishop, Popular Mechanics, September 15, 2015
 * Computer Learns to Hack Chess by Al Williams, Hackaday, October 02, 2015
 * The Chess Engine that Died So AlphaGo Could Live by Rollin Bishop, Motherboard, March 14, 2016 » AlphaGo
 * Giraffe 20150908 64-bit in CCRL Blitz

Misc

 * Giraffe from Wikipedia
 * Giraffe - Internal systems


 * Manu Dibango - Electric Africa, YouTube Video

=References=

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