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Impressive work by Google research team. I'm both impressed and scared. This is our Deep Blue moment folks. a history is made.
by niuzeta 11y ago
Impressive work by Google research team. I'm both impressed and scared.
This is our Deep Blue moment folks. a history is made.
- yulunli 11y agoThis seems to be more impressive than the Deep Blue moment. In 1996, Deep Blue didn't make it on the first try. Even in 1997, it has been a draw until the 6th game. Although AlphaGo has 2 games to go, the first three seem to be a clear victory.
- partycoder 11y agoFar more impressive than the Deep Blue moment. This time the computer did not win out of pure bruteforce. Deep Blue relied on an opening book and massive computational power to explore the game tree. After the opening it was pretty much on its own, bruteforcing moves. This technology used a neural network trained with hundreds of thousands of games which provided the pattern matching aspect, combined with the bruteforce move sequence reading, the montecarlo tree search... and 1200 CPUs + 600 GPUs.
- nikbackm 11y agoDeep Blue was the 259th most powerful supercomputer of its time, what might the corresponding placement of Alpha-Go be?
- dzdt 11y agoAlphaGo is using a 1920 cpu/ 280 gpu distributed setup for the Sedol games. One source reported the gpus are Nvidia K40. The gpus give a peak possible performance of 470 terraflops. That would put it somewhere in the middle of the Top500 list, similar to Deep Blue in its time. Note though that AlphaGo almost certainly uses single precision arithmetic -- for neural networks even single precision is overkill. Also the Top500 list is based on Linpack, which measures performance for computations that are pretty strongly interconnected across the different processors of the system. AlphaGo's Monte Carlo tree search problem is more embarrasingly parallel, with evaluation of different positions really being independent computations. It is much easier to make systems that can handle embarrasingly parallel loads than the highly interconnected loads handled by the top500 supercomputers. So even though the flops are comparable, the systems are not.
- emcq 11y agoAssuming a Titan X with single precision, those 600 GPUs are 4 PFlops! Deep Blue extrapolated to today with Moore's law would only be ~72TFlops. While DNN+RL+Tree search is cool, the hardware requirements for AlphaGo to play at this level are staggering and only supported by large marketing budgets :)
- esturk 11y agoGive credit where credit is due. This is DeepMind's research, and Google acquired them in 2014. Of course, Google gave them a lot of resources to train AlphaGo. But let's not bury the subsidiary, or I guess they would both be subs to Alphabet now making the two even less related.
- gniv 11y agoDeepMind is part of Google.
- bluecmd 11y agoWell, 2 of the authors are from Google itself, so it's not fair to say it's 100% DeepMind as well.
- drjesusphd 11y agoIf they wanted ultimate credit, they shouldn't have sold. They made a judgment call and part of that is Google gets a share of the congratulations.
- Cyph0n 11y agoYes, but the team is Google DeepMind, not "Google research team".
- timothya 11y agoAccording to the pre-match interview[0], the AlphaGo project is about two years old, and started out as a collaboration between two members of DeepMind and a member of the Google Brain team (Google's deep learning team which pre-dates the DeepMind acquisition by several years, according to Wikipedia). So really, AlphaGo is a combined effort that was always a part of Google, and I think it's pretty clear that resources provided by Google (money, equipment, and tooling) in addition to the techniques developed by both Google and DeepMind made this project a reality. I think they both deserve a lot of credit, certainly, but I wouldn't say that the credit is all that misplaced here. [0]: https://youtu.be/qUAmTYHEyM8?t=1201 https://youtu.be/qUAmTYHEyM8?t=1201
- tzs 11y agoHopefully Google does not do what IBM did and stop playing after they win. IBM lost in 1996, 2-4, and then won in 1997, 3.5-2.5. If they had played a third match with Kasparov, especially a longer match, it is not at all clear that they would have won. Kasparov asked for a third match of 10 games, to be played over 20 days, but IBM would not give it to him.
- qznc 11y agoWhat is the point? What a few years and you can get an equivalent AI on your home computer. Play as many games as you want. Of course, you can change rules as much as you want and generate new marketing events. Personally, I would like a match where the AI is only allowed the energy a human uses. I guess, AlphaGo would lose with only 2000 kcal (2.3 kWh). Not sure about chess.
- iopq 11y agoA phone with Stockfish would beat the top players today, but I'm not sure how much energy a phone uses.
- MagnumOpus 11y agoA custom-built chess computer comsuming 200W would certainly win against Carlsen - even the smartphone in your pocket might. Pocket Fritz (HIARCS) was winning Grandmaster tournaments and got rated at 2800-2900 Elo - on a smartphone in 2009 using 1W worth of power without offloading to a GPU. The GPU in a more modern phone like the Samsung Galaxy S5 can crunch 140 GFLOPS - an order of magnitude more than Deep Blue (11 GFLOPS). Allowing 200W of power draw raises your computation power into the TFLOPS area (using a PS4, say). No contest - even without two decades of chess engine improvement over Deep Blue.