lkaufman wrote:EvgeniyZh wrote:Milos wrote:clumma wrote:Milos wrote:4 hours my ass (pardon my french).
Far fewer transistors and joules were used training AlphaZero than have been used training Stockfish. You can soon rent those TPUs on Google's cloud, or apply for free access now, so stop complaining. Furthermore it's an experimental project in early days and performance is obviously not optimal, so all the 'but-but-but 30 Elo because they used SF 8 instead of SF 8.00194' sounds really dumb.
Days of alpha-beta engines have come to an abrupt end.
-Carl
Sorry, that is pretty childish rent.
Google is obviously comparing apples and oranges and again doing marketing stunt and ppl are falling for it.
Days of Alpha0 on normal hardware are years away. But keep on dreaming, no one can take that from you.
P.S. Just as a small comparison. leelazero open source project trying to replicate alpha0 in Go, took 1 month to get the same games as AG0 got in 3 hours, that with constant 1000 volunteers.
For chess it would take even more.
Training AlphaZero would take tons of time. Just like creating SF from 0. However, running it took 4 TPU, which is comparable to whats available to (rich) consumers - you can get 6-8 NVIDIA V100 which would get you similar performance.
To me this is the most informative post in the whole thread, assuming it is accurate (I know nothing about TPUs). The only reasonable comparison I can think of between the AlphaZero hardware and the Stockfish hardware is cost of equivalent machines. It doesn't matter to me how much hardware was used to reach the current level of strength for both engines, just whether the playing conditions were fair. You seem to be implying that comparable hardware to the 4 TPUs would cost no more (maybe much less?) than the sixty-four core machine used by SF. Is this correct? I'm asking to learn, not making a claim myself either way.
The info on TPUs is vague, but it's said to have ~45 TFLOPs (half precision probably). For example see
here. That would mean that AlphaZero ran 180 TFLOPs system. It's believed 1080 Ti is kinda cost-optimal for DL, and you'd need 16-18 of them to match performance (you may round up to 20). That's not what you'd put at home, but many DL researchers have that amount of resources. I'd roughly approximate it around $60k for the whole thing, give or take. With next generation GPU you probably can fit the whole thing in one node.
lkaufman wrote:
The other conditions were of course not "fair", but reasonable given that AlphaZero only trained for a few hours. I suppose if Stockfish used a good book, was allowed to use its time management as if the time limit were pure increment, and used the latest dev. version, the match would have been much closer, but probably (judging by the infinite win to loss ratio and the actual games) SF would have still lost. The games were amazing.
Bottom line, assuming the comparable cost claim is accurate: If Google wants to optimize the software for a few weeks and sell it, rent it, or give it away, we have a revolution in computer chess. But my guess is that they won't do this, in which case the revolution may be delayed a couple years or so.
Agreed, even if Stockfish was in his best condition, he wouldn't probably win. Also, what is more interesting, at least for me, is both engines in their best conditions.
The reaction of computer chess people here reminds me reactions of computer vision people a couple of years ago. They also argued NNs have disadvantages that wouldn't allow them to be widely used.