AlphaZero beats AlphaGo Zero, Stockfish, and Elmo

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

Or 4 V100s which will be available in 2018, or you can order in a workstation now for 70k.

You seem to think GPU progress and process node shrinks are just going to stop. V100 is on 12nm and 7nm chips will have mass availability in 2018.

It is over. Deal with it. Or not.

Hardware has no bearing on human life.

[Milos]

Or 4 V100s which will be available in 2018, or you can order in a workstation now for 70k.

You seem to think GPU progress and process node shrinks are just going to stop. V100 is on 12nm and 7nm chips will have mass availability in 2018.

It is over. Deal with it. Or not.

7nm chips in 2018, give me a break. You clearly have no clue what you are talking about beside quoting some marketing BS.
First you have to understand basic staff about NN inference, difference between floating point single or double precision operation and int8 multiplication done in TPU.
Performance-wise 2nd gen TPU is still 5-10x compared to V100 that we first have to see come out and that comparing marketing data from the advertisement, not real numbers.

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

How many Elo do you have with 1 brain cell?

More than you with a 100.

[Uri Blass]

Alpha had considerable hardware advantage

That comparison is not straightforward, but this claim does not seem to be true. SF had 64 threads. I'm not up on the latest scaling behavior of the engine but that has got to be near saturation.

-Carl

From what I gleaned from hardware comparisons, the advantage is 16/1.
Why would one want to run a similar very unfair match?
Only one thing comes to mind: that the company will want to advertise its colossal breakthrough with TPUs and artificial intelligence and then sell its products.

But then, the achievement is not there.

The fact that Google has created a chess playing entity that crushes SF is notable (and fascinating).

TPUs are not for sale, and (at the moment) are applied only to Googles deep learning and research projects,
except when Google donates them to research for free.

https://techcrunch.com/2017/05/17/the-t ... cientists/

What would be the score between SF on 64 cores and SF on 1024 cores out of 100 games?
You think the bigger-hardware SF would score less than 64 points?
I guess at least 80.

So what is so new?
They applied some big hardware, that is all.
The real strength of Alpha is 2850, so around spot 97 or so among engines.
97 is not such a bad achievement, after all.

I doubt if SF on 1024 cores is going to score even 50%
Maybe after some point more cores are counter productive for stockfish.

I also doubt if it is possible to get at least 80 points against stockfish with 64 cores at 1 minute per move.

[kranium]

So, that, in reality, the hardware difference is not 16/1, as I thought initially, but more like 30/1.
Add to this the early opening advantage Alpha gets due to the simulated book, and conducting the test has been fully meaningless.

Alpha would play not stronger than 1850 on a single core.
Why would I care for such an engine?

Meaningless?
What simulated book?

The point of this was to develop and demonstrate a new level of machine learning and AI using these processors...
AlphaZero obtained the knowledge it needed to beat SF in 4 hours!

No one at Google believes this was a super TCEC World Championship event,
it's simply science, development, and research.

[jhellis3]

More than you with a 100. Very Happy

I'm sure. Well, you can't fix stupid. Bye.

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

I think you are confused. You seem to believe you have something to offer.

The confused one is you, and by much.

[abulmo2]

[
I guess ppl are a bit intimidated to ask question because it is Google, but many things are fishy and unfavourable to SF.
One big disadvantage was TC, 1min/move means SF spent only 1 minute for each of the opening moves while in normal TC like 40/40 it would spend easily 5-10 minutes per each of opening moves. That made it much weaker 20 maybe even 30Elo since most of loses for SF already happen in the opening.

Alpha0 may have a good time management too. This is quite trivial to implement. Given the data used by Alpha0, (moves with probabilities of goodness) it should even be possible to provide a better time management for alpha0 than it is for Stockfish.

Second is no-book play, where Alpha0 mainly forces openings and lines that it spent most of the time training and SF had no help from book whatsever, so in this case to make it at least a bit more fair one should use strong book such as Cerebellum as a support to SF.
Starting from 12 typical human openings (only 4 moves deep at max), the gap Alpha0 had over SF reduced from 100 to 77Elo which can be seen from the paper.

Alpha0 can use an opening book too. And with the computanional power available for it, probably a better one than the Cerebellum book.

Third even though they used last year TCEC winner, SF8 has untested behaviour on 64 cores, and on that hardware is at least 30 if not more Elo weaker than the current SFdev.
So taking all into consideration it is pretty safe to assume that latest Brainfish at normal TC like 40/40 would be at list on par if not stronger than Alpha0.

Right, SF has improved since SF8. But SF8 is the last official release and it is logical to test against it.

And all that on much weaker hardware.

I disagree here. Alpha0 uses more efficient hardware, but not bigger one.

[jhellis3]

7nm chips in 2018, give me a break.

I will take that bet, how much do you want to wager?

[Lyudmil Tsvetkov]

So, that, in reality, the hardware difference is not 16/1, as I thought initially, but more like 30/1.
Add to this the early opening advantage Alpha gets due to the simulated book, and conducting the test has been fully meaningless.

Alpha would play not stronger than 1850 on a single core.
Why would I care for such an engine?

What simulated book?

The point of this was to develop and demonstrate a new level of machine learning and AI using these processors...
AlphaZero obtained the knowledge it needed to beat SF in 4 hours!

No one at Google believes this was a super TCEC World Championship event,
it's simple science and research.

What was the base it started from, is it verifiable, and who will verify it?
You bet, simple science and research, Google are so modest about it, but all the forums world-wide are talking only of that, and in a short while, G will offer its kind support to a range of companies...

I would accept and acknowledge an achievement, but it is weaker than 2900.
Why would I consider a 2900-engine a big achievement?

Similarly, why don't we consider Jonny a big achievement, as it plays on equal terms with the top in Leiden and sometimes outplays them?