alt Hacker NewsCurious, what has you believe that? As someone who doesn't know much about chess AI, I was mostly able to follow along, and figured there were simply some prereqs the author wasn't explaining (e.g. distillation, test-time search, RLVR). If the article is deeply confused in some way I would indeed like to calibrate my BS detectors.
Just to confirm, did you read Cosmo's article (cosmo.tardis.uk black background), or the girl.surgery (white background) article?
ML isn't my strong suit so I wouldn't be able to explain how, but Cosmo's article is almost entirely a refutation of the points made by the root article. No doubt he is very friendly, as someone would be to anyone interested in their field.
What I can speak about is the general construction of sentences, they read (in the most charitable of interpretations) like text messages:
"Good model vs bad model is ~200 elo, but search is ~1200 elo, so even a bad model + search is essentially an oracle to a good model without, and you can distill from bad model + search → good model."
I take it that by "is ~X elo" they mean that implementing that strategy results in a gain of 200 ELO? Which would still be undefined, as 1000 to 1200 is not the same as 2800 to 3000, and improvements are of course not cumulative. I get that this reads more like internal notes, but it was published, so there was some expectation that it would be understood by someone else.
For a lot more reasons, the writing reminds me of notes written by me or by loved ones under influence of drugs. My estimation is that the article was written by a mind that used to be brilliant but is now just echoing that brilliance while, trying to keep their higher order cognitive functions while struggling to maintain the baseline of basic language use. I hope it is reversible and if per is reading this and my estimation is correct, that they perturb the weights in favour of quitting drugs and see if they win more or not.