4 ms·

In 1997, Janice Kim (1p) gave HandTalk a 25-stone handicap: she won.[0] In 2006, Crazy Stone ran on a 4 x 2-core CPU at 2.2 GHz and won gold in a tournament.[1

In 1997, Janice Kim (1p) gave HandTalk a 25-stone handicap: she won.[0] In 2006, Crazy Stone ran on a 4 x 2-core CPU at 2.2 GHz and won gold in a tournament.[1] In 2013, the author purchased a 4 x 16-core CPU at 2.8 GHz for tournament play.[2] I would imagine that that was the hardware used for this game. For such a slow machine the Monte Carlo method has proved devastating.[3] Consider that the the author's computer can reach 332.8 GFLOPs per 2P node[4] and the slowest supercomputer in the world's Top 500 list can reach 236,300 GFLOPs,[5] which is ~710 times faster. The Tianhe-2, for giggles, can peak at 54,902,000 GFLOPs, or ~164,970 times faster. In theory, the Tianhe-2 could demolish a 9p, today. If Moore's Law holds out,[6][7][8] Crazy Stone will likely reach 9p in under 7 years, by virtue of hardware improvements alone. Were IBM to dedicate resources to Computer Go, a machine would be awarded a 9p rank in as few as 3 years. [0] http://mechner.com/david/compgo/sciences/ http://mechner.com/david/compgo/sciences/ [1] http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/09/71804 http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/2006/09/71804 [2] http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.games.devel.go/26670 http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.games.devel.go/26670 [3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go [4] http://www.amd.com/us/Documents/6000_Series_product_brief.pdf http://www.amd.com/us/Documents/6000_Series_product_brief.pd... [5] http://www.top500.org/list/2013/11/?page=5 http://www.top500.org/list/2013/11/?page=5 [6] http://phys.org/news/2013-05-nanowire-transistors-law-alive.html http://phys.org/news/2013-05-nanowire-transistors-law-alive.... [7] http://www.advancedsubstratenews.com/2014/02/fd-soi-keeps-moores-law-on-track/ http://www.advancedsubstratenews.com/2014/02/fd-soi-keeps-mo... [8] http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchips-appears-be-coming-end-no-moore http://www.economist.com/news/21589080-golden-rule-microchip...

hyperpape 13y ago
Current Monte Carlo programs have major problems taking advantage of increased processing power, so your major assumption is flawed. I don't have a citation at hand, but there has been discussion of this on the computer go mailing list. It's not out of the question that the engines could be tweaked to improve their performance more with better/more hardware, but right now, they have disappointing results.
- gcp 13y ago
  I don't have a citation at hand, but there has been discussion of this on the computer go mailing list. You should post it. I suspect you misunderstood. Additional computing power doesn't help some problematic situations, but the overall strength still goes up nicely. There are also some problems with parallel scaling not actually improving raw performance, but this is equivalent to the speed not actually going up.
  - hyperpape 13y ago
    Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it. I found other people on go forums saying that Remi Coulom might have said it, but not a citation. Also, just to be clear, the claim that I'm considering is that around 4-6 dan KGS, you start getting markedly lower payoff in Go strength for increasing the number of playouts. The big concern seems to be capturing races.
- thangalin 13y ago
  "Fortunately, MCTS lends itself much more easily to parallelization" and "Although MCTS can benefit from parallel implementation, this benefit is not always as large as might be hoped" as no game-tree is constructed.[3] I think the assumption holds: we won't have to wait 15 years; in ~7 years (or fewer) we will have 9p Computer Go players. [1] https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/publications.html https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/publications.html [2] https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/ps/2013-CG-MCTS-Go-Limits.pdf https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/ps/2013-CG-MCTS-Go-... [3] http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Silver/web/Applications_files/grand-challenge.pdf http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Silver/web/Applications_fil...

hyperpape 13y ago

Current Monte Carlo programs have major problems taking advantage of increased processing power, so your major assumption is flawed. I don't have a citation at hand, but there has been discussion of this on the computer go mailing list. It's not out of the question that the engines could be tweaked to improve their performance more with better/more hardware, but right now, they have disappointing results.

gcp 13y ago
I don't have a citation at hand, but there has been discussion of this on the computer go mailing list. You should post it. I suspect you misunderstood. Additional computing power doesn't help some problematic situations, but the overall strength still goes up nicely. There are also some problems with parallel scaling not actually improving raw performance, but this is equivalent to the speed not actually going up.
- hyperpape 13y ago
  Unfortunately, I can't seem to find it. I found other people on go forums saying that Remi Coulom might have said it, but not a citation. Also, just to be clear, the claim that I'm considering is that around 4-6 dan KGS, you start getting markedly lower payoff in Go strength for increasing the number of playouts. The big concern seems to be capturing races.
thangalin 13y ago
"Fortunately, MCTS lends itself much more easily to parallelization" and "Although MCTS can benefit from parallel implementation, this benefit is not always as large as might be hoped" as no game-tree is constructed.[3] I think the assumption holds: we won't have to wait 15 years; in ~7 years (or fewer) we will have 9p Computer Go players. [1] https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/publications.html https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/publications.html [2] https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/ps/2013-CG-MCTS-Go-Limits.pdf https://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/ps/2013-CG-MCTS-Go-... [3] http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Silver/web/Applications_files/grand-challenge.pdf http://www0.cs.ucl.ac.uk/staff/D.Silver/web/Applications_fil...