Matthew Lai, a Canadian electrical engineer and computer scientist, and further a private pilot [1], chessplayer and computer chess programmer. He holds a B.Sc. in electrical engineering from University of British Columbia in 2013, and a M.Sc. in advanced computing at Imperial College London in 2015. Matthew Lai is primary author of the chess engine Brainless [2] , a project from Matthew 's high school years, that has been abandoned in about 2008 when German chess master Wieland Belka and Pawel Koziol contributed to the evaluation to play the IOCSC 2010 [3]. His AI research focused on Autonomous Soccer Playing Robots [4] and, as topic of his Master's thesis [5], on deep learning applied to chess within his project Giraffe [6], which discontinued when Matthew started his professional career at Google DeepMind in 2016 [7], soon involved in the AlphaZero project applied to chess, Shogi and Go [8].
Matthew Lai [9]

Chess Engines

• Brainless
• Giraffe

Selected Publications

• Matthew Lai (2015). Giraffe: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Chess. M.Sc. thesis, Imperial College London, arXiv:1509.01549v1
• David Silver, Julian Schrittwieser, Karen Simonyan, Ioannis Antonoglou, Aja Huang, Arthur Guez, Thomas Hubert, Lucas Baker, Matthew Lai, Adrian Bolton, Yutian Chen, Timothy Lillicrap, Fan Hui, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Thore Graepel, Demis Hassabis (2017). Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge. Nature, Vol. 550 ^[10] » AlphaGo
• David Silver, Thomas Hubert, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Matthew Lai, Arthur Guez, Marc Lanctot, Laurent Sifre, Dharshan Kumaran, Thore Graepel, Timothy Lillicrap, Karen Simonyan, Demis Hassabis (2017). Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm. arXiv:1712.01815 » AlphaZero ^[11]

Forum Posts

2008

• Re: resources on how to write an eval function? by cyberfish, March 14, 2008
• fail soft vs fail hard by cyberfish, CCC, November 19, 2008 » Fail-Hard, Fail-Soft
• Crafty - no analysis output near mate? by cyberfish, December 03, 2008 » Crafty

2014

• Using bitboards to store move lists by Matthew Lai, CCC, August 22, 2014
• Memory usage in make/unmake vs logic complexity by Matthew Lai, CCC, August 30, 2014 » Copy-Make, Unmake Move
• FPGA chess by Matthew Lai, CCC, November 26, 2014 » FPGA

2015

• Different eval for white/black by Matthew Lai, CCC, January 05, 2015 » Asymmetric evaluation
• *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 ^[12]
• Time assignment to children by Matthew Lai, CCC, July 26, 2015
• Giraffe 20150801 by Matthew Lai, CCC, August 01, 2015
• Giraffe dissertation, and now open source by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 08, 2015

2016

• Death of Giraffe, but hopefully not ML in chess! by Matthew Lai, CCC, January 21, 2016
• Removing Q-search by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 02, 2016
• Searching using slow eval with tactical verification by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 06, 2016
• Beginner's guide to graphical profiling by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 10, 2016 » Profiling, Giraffe
• SAN test position by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 11, 2016 » SAN
• Best move statistics by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 12, 2016 » Move Ordering
• Searching worse moves first by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 14, 2016 » Move Ordering
• What do you do with NUMA? by Matthew Lai, CCC, September 19, 2016 » NUMA

External Links

• Matthew Lai - LinkedIn
• Piece of Mind by Matthew Lai
  Piece of Mind » Blog Archive » Computer Chess Tournament?! » IOCSC 2010
• Matthew Lai chess games - 365Chess.com
• Brainless - Homepage
• waterreaction / Giraffe — Bitbucket

References

1. ^ Piece of Mind » About
2. ^ Brainless - Homepage
3. ^ Piece of Mind » Blog Archive » Computer Chess Tournament?!
4. ^ Matthew Lai - LinkedIn
5. ^ Matthew Lai (2015). Giraffe: Using Deep Reinforcement Learning to Play Chess. M.Sc. thesis, Imperial College London, arXiv:1509.01549v1
6. ^ *First release* Giraffe, a new engine based on deep learning by Matthew Lai, CCC, July 08, 2015
7. ^ Death of Giraffe, but hopefully not ML in chess! by Matthew Lai, CCC, January 21, 2016
8. ^ David Silver, Thomas Hubert, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Matthew Lai, Arthur Guez, Marc Lanctot, Laurent Sifre, Dharshan Kumaran, Thore Graepel, Timothy Lillicrap, Karen Simonyan, Demis Hassabis (2017). Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm. arXiv:1712.01815
9. ^ New Private Pilot: Matthew Lai | AeroDynamic Aviation, September 2, 2012
10. ^ AlphaGo Zero: Learning from scratch by Demis Hassabis and David Silver, DeepMind, October 18, 2017
11. ^ Google's AlphaGo team has been working on chess by Peter Kappler, CCC, December 06, 2017
12. ^ Russell M. Church, Kenneth W. Church (1977). Plans, Goals, and Search Strategies for the Selection of a Move in Chess. Chess Skill in Man and Machine

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