r/MachineLearning • u/microscope1024 • 1h ago
Project Distilling Stockfish on a Billion Positions, Full 3.9B Dataset Available [P]
In this project, I distilled the Stockfish value function into a ResNet/ViT model using 1 billion positions from the Gigafish dataset.
The 3.9 billion position dataset is available on huggingface: https://huggingface.co/datasets/lukesalamone/gigafish-3.8b-d10 . It is built from the positions from 37 months of Lichess games.
I was interested in the idea that at depth-limited search, the value function attempts to approximate the tree underneath it, and if we could create some function to approximate that full search faster than Stockfish could, it would be competitive with NNUE (a very small neural net). This is why holding the depth constant was important.
For the neural net itself, I found that the vision transformer was very slow to understand the board, and a CNN was much more effective at the beginning of training due to its inherent geometric inductive biases . However, I found the best results when combining the two.



