There is a quite popular video analysing a chess game AlphaZero vs. AlphaZero, called "the perfect game". It leaves some questions open and I'd like to ask them here:
Did the two copies of AlphaZero use the same random seeds in the learning phase, esp. when generating random games? So were they perfect copies of each other at the beginning of the game?
Do the two copies of AlphaZero calculate their moves with the same random seeds when doing Monte Carlo tree search?
In any case there are three possible games all of which may be called "AlphaZero vs. AlphaZero":
- same seeds when learning, same seeds when playing
- same seeds when learning, different seeds when playing
- different seeds when learning (the seeds when playing don't matter then)
In the latter case, I wonder if AlphaZero's playing style (which is for example analyzed in the book Game Changer by Matthew Sadler and Natasha Regan) may depend on the seeds used for generating random games (assuming that the same number of test games is played in the learning phase). In other words: Can AlphaZero develop significantly different playing styles when starting tabula rasa? In this case, Sadler/Regan's book would describe just one instance of AlphaZero.
The last question should be answerable also by those of you who don't know the video and how the premises have been.