Papers › Amortized Planning with Large-Scale Transformers: A Case Study on Chess

Amortized Planning with Large-Scale Transformers: A Case Study on Chess

7 Feb 2024arXiv:2402.04494archive 2025-07-28

Anian Ruoss, Grégoire Delétang, Sourabh Medapati, Jordi Grau-Moya, Li Kevin Wenliang, Elliot Catt, John Reid, Cannada A. Lewis, Joel Veness, Tim Genewein

This paper uses chess, a landmark planning problem in AI, to assess transformers' performance on a planning task where memorization is futile x2013 even at a large scale. To this end, we release ChessBench, a large-scale benchmark dataset of 10 million chess games with legal move and value annotations (15 billion data points) provided by Stockfish 16, the state-of-the-art chess engine. We train transformers with up to 270 million parameters on ChessBench via supervised learning and perform extensive ablations to assess the impact of dataset size, model size, architecture type, and different prediction targets (state-values, action-values, and behavioral cloning). Our largest models learn to predict action-values for novel boards quite accurately, implying highly non-trivial generalization. Despite performing no explicit search, our resulting chess policy solves challenging chess puzzles and achieves a surprisingly strong Lichess blitz Elo of 2895 against humans (grandmaster level). We also compare to Leela Chess Zero and AlphaZero (trained without supervision via self-play) with and without search. We show that, although a remarkably good approximation of Stockfish's search-based algorithm can be distilled into large-scale transformers via supervised learning, perfect distillation is still beyond reach, thus making ChessBench well-suited for future research.

Code

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

7 samples harvested; 5 ran; 0 honoured the contract we drafted; 2 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

Licence: 0 of the 7 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from google-deepmind/searchless_chess. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

Tasks

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Methods

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections