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Contribution Guide

Contributions to AlphaZero.jl are most welcome. Here are some contribution ideas:

We also believe that AlphaZero.jl can be made even faster without adding too much complexity to the codebase. Here are suggestions to make this happen:

  • Accelerate network inference by adding support for FP16 or Int8 quantization
  • Accelerate network inference with Torch.jl
  • Enable data generation, network updates and checkpoint evaluations to be run in parallel

Finally, there are many small improvements and variations that can be built on top of this implementation and that would make for nice ML projects. Here are a few examples:

  • Implement and compare different First-Play Urgency strategies
  • Implement tools to automate and help with hyperparameter tuning
  • Add a resignation mechanism to speed-up self-play
  • Give more weight to recent samples during learning
  • Use rollouts in addition to the network's value head to evaluate positions (as is done by AlphaGo Lee)
  • Use supervised learning to initialize the network based on a set of games played by humans
  • Implement the alternate training target proposed here
  • Implement some of the improvements introduced in the KataGo paper

You may also want to have a look at our JSOC (Julia Summer of Code) project page.

Please do not hesitate to open a Github issue to share any idea, feedback or suggestion.

Solve new games

The simplest way to contribute to AlphaZero.jl is to demonstrate it on new games. Interesting candidates include: Othello, Gobblet, Go 9x9, Chess... A nice first-time contribution may also be to provide an example of using AlphaZero.jl in conjunction with OpenSpiel.jl.

Help with hyperparameter tuning

A good place to start would be to experiment with the parameters of the Connect Four agent discussed in the tutorial, as it went through little tuning and can probably be improved significantly. Any kind of hyperparameters study would be extremely valuable in getting a better understanding of AlphaZero's training process.

More generally, as a training session can take hours or days, it is hard for a single person to fine-tune AlphaZero's many hyperparameters. In an effort to tackle more and more ambitious games, it would be useful to come up with a collaborative process for running tuning experiments and share the resulting insights.

Improve the user interface

An effort has been made in designing AlphaZero.jl to separate the user interface code from the core logic (see AlphaZero.Handlers). We would be interested in seeing alternative user interfaces being developed. In particular, using something like TensorBoardLogger or Dash for logging and/or profiling might be nice.