The few and rare times an engine gets funky is usually in end-game positions where the engine can’t seem to find a sacrifice to win the game and will output a current position as drawn. These cases are few and I very much doubt that a human would be able to find these moves in an actual match.
Now if you’re talking about the way the chess engine learns, it can learn in two different ways: without human help (learning completely on its own giving it nothing but the rules which is how AlphaGo works), or with human aid (through chess theory accumulated over centuries of human matches that these engines have built in as part of their evaluations). Things get very interesting.
I’d recommend you to look up a few games between AlphaGo and Stockfish, which embody these two different philosophies and battle it to the teeth and bones. The matches are brilliant. I would say though that it seems like AlphaGo (learning the game entirely through scratch without human help) has seemed to triumph more times than Stockfish and with the nature of these systems, I’d suspect it to continue that trend.
However I agree that the games between AlphaGo and Stockfish are really interesting. It strikes me that the AlphaGo version of chess looks a lot more human; it seems to place value on strategic ideas (activity, tempo, freedom of movement) that any human player would recognise.
It's kind of crazy how AlphaZero has managed the success it has. Stockfish calculates roughly 60 million moves per second and AlphaZero calculates at only 60 thousand per second. Three orders of magnitude less yet its brilliance is mesmerizing, tearing Stockfish apart in certain matches.
Not to be too picky, but it was AlphaGo _Zero_ that learned from the rules alone. AlphaGo learned from a large database of human played games: "...trained by a novel combination of supervised learning from human expert games". [1]
AlphaGo Zero, derived from AlphaGo, was "an algorithm based solely on reinforcement learning, without human data, guidance or domain knowledge beyond game rules". [2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo_Zero https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaZero
Agadmator's youtube channel covers a bunch of those. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yM0D1iZLrg
Pawn structure? BAH! King safety? CHARGE!
And then 75 moves later Stockfish is in zugzwang.
And still he lost against Kasparov. Which doesn't happen now, top engines haven't been beaten by humans since ~2006.
Computers are now as much better than Magnus Carlsen as he is better than a moderate amateur.
If even the best player overrides a move he's much more likely to be reducing the strength of the move than increasing it.
Source: I’m a correspondence international chess master
I wasn't thinking about correspondence but what was the latest large cyborg correspondence tournament?
