I think the alphago program is getting similar crazy scale burn-in access to the gpu computing that google will soon offer in its cloud. Recall alphago was the

I think the alphago program is getting similar crazy scale burn-in access to the gpu computing that google will soon offer in its cloud. Recall alphago was the first program to beat a professional in a tournament setting. They published in nature. The emphasis was on their deep learning approach, but the technical details were pretty impressive. Alphago beat Fan Hui, a 2 dan professional, using a 1202 cpu/776 gpu diatributed system. They don't give hardware details, but my back-of-the-envelope estimate based on recent hardware is they were at around the petaflop calculation rate. In the nature paper they examine how the program's ELO rating varies with computation power; it looks like to reach world champion level they need at least an order of magnitude more computation. They challenged a player at that level (Lee Sedol) for a series in March and express a quiet confidence in winning. On their blog they give google cloud credit for supplying the compute power, but google cloud doesn't yet have gpu units available publicly. I am thinking alphago is getting to do burn-in on a massive gpu cloud computing center. Look for public availability shortly after the Sedol match!