Yep, this is much more interesting!
The issue is not one of capturing races at all, or ko, or anything else like that. It’s specifically cyclic-topology groups.
It’s a known issue that is common to all AlphaZero-trained bots, as far as I’m aware - I’m pretty sure convnets consistently learn the incorrect algorithm for determining whether a group is alive, one that only works on tree-topology groups and not groups that have cycles. As of a week or two ago, I’ve already been talking with the paper authors about it.
See here for the earliest prior discovery of this systematic weakness I’m aware of, it has also been reported in other places several times since then, and I’ve tested enough AZ reproductions back when it was originally discovered to think that it probably applies to all AZ agents that use convolution-based nets.
Anyways, although the weakness is not new, this is now the first time we have a way to systematically generate examples, so I think the result is very interesting and cool. And we now have a way to generate enough natural examples to try to see whether a net can be trained to understand cyclic-topology groups, which we couldn’t do before. I’ll be trying that at some point in the next months.