
Google's 'superhuman' DeepMind AI claims chess crown - scotty79
http://www.bbc.com/news/technology-42251535
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scotty79
Some commentators pointed out that Stockfish was crippled by running on
incomparable hardware.

maelic: It is a nice step different direction, perhaps the start if the
revolution but Alpha Zero is not yet better than Stockfish and if you keep up
with me I will explain why. Most of the people are very excited now and
wishing for sensation so they don't really read the paper or think about what
it says which leads to uninformed opinions.

The testing conditions were terrible. 1min/move is not really suitable time
for any engine testing but you could tolerate that. What is intolerable though
is the hashtable size - with 64 cores Stockfish was given, you would expect
around 32GB or more otherwise it fills up very quickly leading to markant
reduce in strenght - 1GB was given and that far from ideal value! Also SF was
now given any endgame tablebases which is current norm for any computer chess
engine.

The computational power behind each entity was very different - while SF was
given 64 CPU threads (really a lot I've got to say), Alpha Zero was given 4
TPUs. TPU is a specialized chip for machine learning and neural network
calculations. It's estimated power compared to classical CPU is as follows -
1TPU ~ 30xE5-2699v3 (18 cores machine) -> Aplha Zero had at it's back power of
~2000 Haswell cores. That is nowhere near fair match. And yet, eventhough the
result was dominant, it was not where it would be if SF faced itself 2000cores
vs 64 cores, It that case the win percentage would be much more heavily in
favor of the more powerful hardware.

From those observations we can make an conclusion - Alpha Zero is not so close
in strenght to SF as Google would like us to believe. Incorrect match settings
suggest either lack of knowledge about classical brute-force calculating
engines and how they are properly used, or intention to create conditions
where SF would be defeted.

With all that said, It is still an amazing achievement and definitively fresh
air in computer chess, most welcome these days. But for the new computer chess
champion we will have to wait a little bit longer.

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oldandtired
I have made the comment before that there is nothing superhuman about such
systems. Nothing at all. The system in question is running at GHz, is focussed
only on one subject and has no sensory interruptions to deal with when
compared to a human. We don't run at MHz let alone GHz (not even at kHz). We
are continually processing huge amounts of sensory information in parallel to
any thinking about playing such a game and we are usually focussed on more
things than just the game.

[EDIT; add missing words]

