Can any computer chess/stockfish experts comment on the choice of 1 GB for hash size? I have no chess or computer chess domain expertise whatsoever, but it strikes me as a suspiciously low setting for a memory-related parameter on what was probably at least a 32 core machine. It makes me wonder if they simply dialed down the hash size until they got a nice convincing win.
Update: took a look at settings used for TCEC. Looks like they used 16 GB in season 7, 64GB in season 8, 32 GB in season 9, and 16 GB in season 10. Two observations: (1) interesting that they've decreased hash sizes in recent years (2) definitely seems like 1 GB is not reflective of how an engine would be configured for TCEC.
It does seem low, but I doubt the effect on performance would be huge. Certainly not enough to affect the major claims of the paper.
For example, on my 4-core machine I just loaded up two instances of Stockfish, one with 32MB hash and one with 512MB, and assigned 2 cores to each. I loaded up a few random middlegame positions, and after analyzing for 1 minute, the evaluations and main lines were generally the same (within the margin of error for repeated runs of the same engine). when analyzing the Kasparov's immortal game, it was a toss-up which engine would find the famous rook sac first.
1GB is probably suboptimal on the hardware they used, but the difference is probably minimal.
From what I've read scattered across a few different chess discussion places, the consensus seems to be that a) yes, 1 GB is pretty small b) it would matter, but c) probably not enough to change the end result.
I guess we will have to wait for next year's TCEC for the final verdict though. Hope they change the hardware specs in some way that would allow AlphaZero to compete.
Update: took a look at settings used for TCEC. Looks like they used 16 GB in season 7, 64GB in season 8, 32 GB in season 9, and 16 GB in season 10. Two observations: (1) interesting that they've decreased hash sizes in recent years (2) definitely seems like 1 GB is not reflective of how an engine would be configured for TCEC.