5 ms·

Next challenge: a machine that can can beat a human using an equal amount of energy.

by sadgit 9y ago

_yosefk 9y ago
No problem beating most humans already. Beating the best human? How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? Such humans are rare so you ought to count all the others as part of the cost of making the best human as you can't quite make them on demand (though Laslo Polgar might disagree). I don't get the energy point. The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7. Doesn't that count for something? But your wish will come true. Go isn't a special snowflake. If you have an objective metric of success in a formal universe machines always win.
- al_chemist 9y ago
  > How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? By your definition, on AI side we should add energy spent on creating AI and civilization that produced it.
  - piyush_soni 9y ago
    And also, there's a certain amount of 'healthcare' cost involved like with all other computers.
  - jayd16 9y ago
    I think he's amortizing the cost to zero for the AI because the marginal cost per additional AI is much lower than the cost to sustain a civilization to churn out and bin human go players.
- dogecoinbase 9y ago
  How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? Did... you really just say that, about a process that requires not only a civilization, but one sufficiently decadent that it can afford to waste resources making silicon that turns burned coal into pointless game victories? The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7. I think by your previous metrics, you should be counting the heathcare costs of the ops folks who run the hardware, and I guess the healthcare costs of their healthcare workers, ad nauseum.
- georgyo 9y ago
  Assuming 2000 calories/day, a human averages 97 Watts/hour. Ke Jie is currently 19, so he has used an estimate of 670kWH for both his training set and playing his games. Getting a machine to win that consumes less than 97W/H would be hard. Taking a new machine and loading training data on it and having it win would be far less than 670kWH
  - dragonwriter 9y ago
    > Assuming 2000 calories/day, a human averages 97 Watts/hour. 97W, not 97W/h.
  - Sharlin 9y ago
    > Watts/hour Watts is already "per hour", mind. Or per second to be precise.
    - 21 9y ago
      Why is electricity then measured in kW/h? In my understanding, power (instantaneous) is measured in W, but consumption needs to be integrated over time, thus the per hour part.
      - z0k 9y ago
        It's not kW/h, it's kWh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt_hour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt_hour
        TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Which is kW * h, i.e. kilowatt times hours, like man-hours are number of men multiplied by time.
      - deleted 9y ago
        [deleted]
      - Sharlin 9y ago
        kW/h would be a unit of the derivative of power, measuring the rate at which power consumption changes.
- darkerside 9y ago
  > If you have an objective metric of success in a formal universe machines always win. More like, machines will eventually win given enough time and effort put forth into making it so by humans. At least, so far.
- Cybiote 9y ago
  Your point is not very different from those who say AlphaGo's is really a human victory because human teams built it. Such a distinction based on a historical trace is not a useful one to make. Similarly, the sum total of energy a modern human in a developed society has available to it is not an insightful observation to make when talking about playing Go. It is more a reflection of a civilization's wealth. The best humans from 100, perhaps even 500 years ago would still give almost all modern humans and computers a very hard time. In fact, computers are even more dependent on a technological society (and so more dependent on a large number of humans) than humans are. The discussion is energy use at play time. For each given second, a certain number of joules are being used to compute a decision. That number as of today, in an unaided match, is independent of civilization's technological state. That said, AlphaGo has seen a huge (10x?) gain in efficiency according to David Silver. Still far from a human but nonetheless very impressive drop in just a year.
- taneq 9y ago
  This is my argument for universal basic income. The true cost of your hyper-effective, top-0.1% employees isn't just their salaries, it's the cost of the entire society that raised them.
zamalek 9y ago
AlphaGo is approaching that bar. Google's TPUs are only becoming more energy efficient.
- glandium 9y ago
  And they said during the press conference that AlphaGo was running on a single machine this time.
  - gcp 9y ago
    With a set of TPUs in it, though. "Single machine" is rather vague, you can build them as big as you want :-)
jvolkman 9y ago
In the post-game press conference, DeepMind mentioned that the version currently playing uses 10x less compute than the Lee Sedol version and runs on a single machine.
0xcoffee 9y ago
Is that the cumulative energy over the lifetime of the human player (time spent training our neural networks), or just the energy spent during the match?
fdej 9y ago
That improvement took about decade for computer chess, through a combination of algorithm and hardware improvements. A decade might be a reasonable ballpark estimate for Go as well (but even less than that is realistic). On the hardware side, I would not be surprised if analog circuits make a comeback.
- red75prime 9y ago
  Neural network in petri dish?
Houshalter 9y ago
Hey, they provided the human players with a power outlet and let them draw as much power as they wanted. The competition was totally fair. But seriously, it's possible that AlphaGo is already much more energy efficient than a human player. The main reason it uses tons of energy, is the tree search part of the algorithm. Where it runs hundreds of thousands of simulated games to further analyze every move. This improves it's skill, but only by a little bit. IIRC, the version without tree search beat the full version 25% of the time. Which would still give it a higher elo than Sedol, which only beat it 20% of the time (and AlphaGo has improved since those games.) Google is also using custom TPUs, which are claimed to be something like an order of magnitude or more energy efficient than GPUs. And computing technology is only getting more energy efficient with time. In principle, transistors moving around a few electrons are vastly more energy efficient than the very wasteful chemical reactions used in brain. We also know how to "sparsify" nets and remove tons unnecessary connections that could reduce computations a lot. But there's generally no point in doing that because it's not faster on normal hardware.
- comboy 9y ago
  > IIRC, the version without tree search beat the full version 25% of the time. That would be amazing but it seems hard to believe. Any references? I found this (which is also impressive): AlphaGo team then tested the performance of the policy networks. At each move, they chose the actions that were predicted by the policy networks to give the highest likelihood of a win. Using this strategy, each move took only 3 ms to compute. They tested their best-performing policy network against Pachi, the strongest open-source Go program, and which relies on 100,000 simulations of MCTS at each turn. AlphaGo's policy network won 85% of the games against Pachi! 1. https://www.tastehit.com/blog/google-deepmind-alphago-how-it-works/ https://www.tastehit.com/blog/google-deepmind-alphago-how-it... 2. https://gogameguru.com/i/2016/03/deepmind-mastering-go.pdf https://gogameguru.com/i/2016/03/deepmind-mastering-go.pdf
  - computerex 9y ago
    I don't know about the 25% figure, but the original Alpha GO paper mentioned that their best solution is a hybrid approach between neural nets and MCTS. However, the system can beat the best Go bots out there without doing MCTS and relying solemnly on the policy/value networks, which I think is truly amazing.

Next challenge: a machine that can can beat a human using an equal amount of energy.

by sadgit 9y ago

Next challenge: a machine that can can beat a human using an equal amount of energy.

No problem beating most humans already. Beating the best human? How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? Such humans are rare so you ought to count all the others as part of the cost of making the best human as you can't quite make them on demand (though Laslo Polgar might disagree). I don't get the energy point. The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7. Doesn't that count for something? But your wish will come true. Go isn't a special snowflake. If you have an objective metric of success in a formal universe machines always win.

al_chemist 9y ago
> How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? By your definition, on AI side we should add energy spent on creating AI and civilization that produced it.
- piyush_soni 9y ago
  And also, there's a certain amount of 'healthcare' cost involved like with all other computers.
- jayd16 9y ago
  I think he's amortizing the cost to zero for the AI because the marginal cost per additional AI is much lower than the cost to sustain a civilization to churn out and bin human go players.
dogecoinbase 9y ago
How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? Did... you really just say that, about a process that requires not only a civilization, but one sufficiently decadent that it can afford to waste resources making silicon that turns burned coal into pointless game victories? The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7. I think by your previous metrics, you should be counting the heathcare costs of the ops folks who run the hardware, and I guess the healthcare costs of their healthcare workers, ad nauseum.
georgyo 9y ago
Assuming 2000 calories/day, a human averages 97 Watts/hour. Ke Jie is currently 19, so he has used an estimate of 670kWH for both his training set and playing his games. Getting a machine to win that consumes less than 97W/H would be hard. Taking a new machine and loading training data on it and having it win would be far less than 670kWH
- dragonwriter 9y ago
  > Assuming 2000 calories/day, a human averages 97 Watts/hour. 97W, not 97W/h.
- Sharlin 9y ago
  > Watts/hour Watts is already "per hour", mind. Or per second to be precise.
  - 21 9y ago
    Why is electricity then measured in kW/h? In my understanding, power (instantaneous) is measured in W, but consumption needs to be integrated over time, thus the per hour part.
    - z0k 9y ago
      It's not kW/h, it's kWh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt_hour https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt_hour
      - TeMPOraL 9y ago
        Which is kW * h, i.e. kilowatt times hours, like man-hours are number of men multiplied by time.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - Sharlin 9y ago
      kW/h would be a unit of the derivative of power, measuring the rate at which power consumption changes.
darkerside 9y ago
> If you have an objective metric of success in a formal universe machines always win. More like, machines will eventually win given enough time and effort put forth into making it so by humans. At least, so far.
Cybiote 9y ago
Your point is not very different from those who say AlphaGo's is really a human victory because human teams built it. Such a distinction based on a historical trace is not a useful one to make. Similarly, the sum total of energy a modern human in a developed society has available to it is not an insightful observation to make when talking about playing Go. It is more a reflection of a civilization's wealth. The best humans from 100, perhaps even 500 years ago would still give almost all modern humans and computers a very hard time. In fact, computers are even more dependent on a technological society (and so more dependent on a large number of humans) than humans are. The discussion is energy use at play time. For each given second, a certain number of joules are being used to compute a decision. That number as of today, in an unaided match, is independent of civilization's technological state. That said, AlphaGo has seen a huge (10x?) gain in efficiency according to David Silver. Still far from a human but nonetheless very impressive drop in just a year.
taneq 9y ago
This is my argument for universal basic income. The true cost of your hyper-effective, top-0.1% employees isn't just their salaries, it's the cost of the entire society that raised them.

zamalek 9y ago

AlphaGo is approaching that bar. Google's TPUs are only becoming more energy efficient.

glandium 9y ago
And they said during the press conference that AlphaGo was running on a single machine this time.
- gcp 9y ago
  With a set of TPUs in it, though. "Single machine" is rather vague, you can build them as big as you want :-)

jvolkman 9y ago

In the post-game press conference, DeepMind mentioned that the version currently playing uses 10x less compute than the Lee Sedol version and runs on a single machine.

0xcoffee 9y ago

Is that the cumulative energy over the lifetime of the human player (time spent training our neural networks), or just the energy spent during the match?

fdej 9y ago

That improvement took about decade for computer chess, through a combination of algorithm and hardware improvements. A decade might be a reasonable ballpark estimate for Go as well (but even less than that is realistic). On the hardware side, I would not be surprised if analog circuits make a comeback.

red75prime 9y ago
Neural network in petri dish?

Houshalter 9y ago

Hey, they provided the human players with a power outlet and let them draw as much power as they wanted. The competition was totally fair. But seriously, it's possible that AlphaGo is already much more energy efficient than a human player. The main reason it uses tons of energy, is the tree search part of the algorithm. Where it runs hundreds of thousands of simulated games to further analyze every move. This improves it's skill, but only by a little bit. IIRC, the version without tree search beat the full version 25% of the time. Which would still give it a higher elo than Sedol, which only beat it 20% of the time (and AlphaGo has improved since those games.) Google is also using custom TPUs, which are claimed to be something like an order of magnitude or more energy efficient than GPUs. And computing technology is only getting more energy efficient with time. In principle, transistors moving around a few electrons are vastly more energy efficient than the very wasteful chemical reactions used in brain. We also know how to "sparsify" nets and remove tons unnecessary connections that could reduce computations a lot. But there's generally no point in doing that because it's not faster on normal hardware.

comboy 9y ago
> IIRC, the version without tree search beat the full version 25% of the time. That would be amazing but it seems hard to believe. Any references? I found this (which is also impressive): AlphaGo team then tested the performance of the policy networks. At each move, they chose the actions that were predicted by the policy networks to give the highest likelihood of a win. Using this strategy, each move took only 3 ms to compute. They tested their best-performing policy network against Pachi, the strongest open-source Go program, and which relies on 100,000 simulations of MCTS at each turn. AlphaGo's policy network won 85% of the games against Pachi! 1. https://www.tastehit.com/blog/google-deepmind-alphago-how-it-works/ https://www.tastehit.com/blog/google-deepmind-alphago-how-it... 2. https://gogameguru.com/i/2016/03/deepmind-mastering-go.pdf https://gogameguru.com/i/2016/03/deepmind-mastering-go.pdf
- computerex 9y ago
  I don't know about the 25% figure, but the original Alpha GO paper mentioned that their best solution is a hybrid approach between neural nets and MCTS. However, the system can beat the best Go bots out there without doing MCTS and relying solemnly on the policy/value networks, which I think is truly amazing.