If you read the court case, you can see quite clearly that he never obtained any evidence, and simply hoped to go on a general fishing expedition.
For him, it was like the AlphaChip authors performed a magic trick. Magic is impossible, and so something must be up. Even if he doesn't know how they did it, there must surely be fraud somewhere. Did it ever occur to him that he might just be wrong?
The closest thing he had to "evidence" of his belief was his study where he says he tried AlphaChip and got worse results than SA. But even that study was flawed, and known to be flawed at the time. From "That Chip Has Sailed":
"In 2022, it was reviewed by an independent committee at Google, which determined that “the claims and conclusions in the draft are not scientifically backed by the experiments” [33] and “as the [AlphaChip] results on their original datasets were independently reproduced, this brought the [Markov et al.] RL results into question” [33]. We provided the committee with one-line scripts that generated significantly better RL results than those reported in Markov et al., outperforming their “stronger” simulated annealing baseline. We still do not know how Markov and his collaborators produced the numbers in their paper."
([33] is the sworn statement from Jon Orwant, head of the independent resolution committee.)
How large do you imagine the conspiracy is here? The method is secretly bad, but the TPU team uses it in production anyway? MediaTek built on it anyway? The TF-Agents team claimed to reproduce it, but they're actually lying? Jeff Dean put his reputation behind it but he's either fooled or lying?
Please hold off on replying further on this thread until you have read OP's linked paper. I understand you want to defend your field against the encroachment of people you perceive to be bad actors, but I believe you have things backwards.
