The strength of the language I used was motivated largely by the obviously bad-faith approach employed when they _first_ announced AlphaZero a year ago. They wanted to be able to say they'd created the strongest engine in the world, and they created an environment where it was hard to fail. I will admit the setup used in this paper seems more reasonable on that basis.

That said, I've checked out a few old versions of Stockfish (including the exact commit they used) and analysed the games in Table S6 in the paper. Stockfish still spots multiple blunders in its own play. Obviously these things aren't entirely deterministic, but it seems unlikely there was time trouble.

And again, just to be clear, there's little doubt in my mind that AlphaZero's evaluation of any given position is better than Stockfish's or anyone else's. I'm not even saying it can't reliably beat Stockfish. I just find it sad that the evidence of its overall strength continues to be wobbly.

Yes, at a very amateurish level, and I contribute a lot of CPU/GPU time to LCZero. But I've also played all the published games through Stockfish at the published time controls, and the results make no sense.

To be specific, in a written comment on a public forum, it would be "libelous" and not "slanderous". But to be either, it would also have to be false, and at least in the US, known to be false to the author at the time it was written or written with a reckless disregard for the truth.

He says he's analyzed the published games, and found that Stockfish finds obvious errors in the way that Stockfish was said to be playing. Unless he's consciously lying about this (I'd guess unlikely?) it's not libel. And if it's true that a correctly configured Stockfish doesn't play the way it was said to play, this would be a strong indication that either intentionally or accidentally, it was not a fair playing field.

Anyway, if your point was that it might be more productive to be more polite, sure! But one might say the same about accusing someone of slander.