Doubtful; I don't think comparing such small W/L distributions will be illustrative. On the other hand, the Nature paper shows the single 8 GPU machine perform

Doubtful; I don't think comparing such small W/L distributions will be illustrative. On the other hand, the Nature paper shows the single 8 GPU machine performs similar to the 64 GPU cluster, but the larger clusters perform a comfortable margin better. [0] By a single machine winning many games relative to the distributed version, really it's just saying that the value/policy network is more important than the monte carlo tree search. The main difference is the number of tree search evaluations you can do; it doesn't seem like they have a more sophisticated model in the parallel version. The figure suggests that there are systematic mistakes that the single 8 GPU machine makes compared to the distributed 280 GPU machine, but MCTS can smooth some of the individual mistakes over a bit. [0] http://www.milesbrundage.com/uploads/2/1/6/8/21681226/8771727_orig.png http://www.milesbrundage.com/uploads/2/1/6/8/21681226/877172...