Grandmaster-level chess without search

They built a dumber clone of Stockfish, and they call it ‘zero’ for some reason. What is the meaning behind ‘zero’ anyways? It used to refer to zero-shot, but now it seems like it’s just a marketing term.

I assume it's 'zero' turns lookahead/search, i.e. only look at the current board state.

I assume you’re referring to AlphaZero and Leela Chess Zero.

AlphaZero was the successor to AlphaGo. AZ was notable because unlike AG, it used zero human games to learn to play: it just played games against itself. Typically in “supervised” machine learning you take human data and train a model to imitate it. AZ used zero human data to learn.

Leela Chess Zero started out as an open source copy of AZ but it’s probably better than AZ now.

Zero doesn't mean zero shot learning. It was coined by Deepmind for AlphaGo Zero where they used zero human input into the training data. It was trained entirely by playing against itself.

And they gave Sir Demis a Nobel Prize!