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Originally Posted by ChrisV
This is just utter nonsense from start to finish. For starters, when he says "massive hardware upgrades almost doubled the playing-strength of AlphaGo", his link says no such thing and he has no way of knowing that. AlphaGo Master played on better hardware than AlphaGo Lee, but it was also a new version of the neural net. From the publicly available facts, here's no way of knowing which of these things caused the improvement.
The link shows AlphaGo getting stronger in a linear way, correlated to the hardware upgrades. Note: It can only be the hardware, because the algorithm doesn't change. It's a neural net that plays against itself until it reaches a stable ranking.
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Secondly, we know what effect better hardware has on Stockfish's rating. Doubling processor speed adds about 60 ELO, doubling cores 40 ELO. There's huge diminishing returns on brute-force search because the search space expands exponentially. It's certainly true that AlphaZero requires much more processing power than Stockfish does to play at a high level. It would get annihilated if both ran on a desktop computer. It does not follow that AlphaZero's advantage over Stockfish was simply processing power, nor that Stockfish would "beat AlphaZero easily" on similar top-end hardware. It can simply be the case that AlphaZero improves much more as hardware gets better than Stockfish does.
At least you agree that hardware matters. It's all about search-horizon. Stockfish finds these moves too, just an hour later.
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It may also be the case that the ELO added by hardware improvement doesn't translate to much better performance against AlphaZero specifically. The kind of positions engines don't understand, such as closed positions where one side can't actually use their material advantage, aren't solved by adding additional processing power. It may be that the positional weakness in Stockfish's game which AlphaZero exploits is precisely the aspect of its game that improves least with additional processing power.
It may or it may not. You can't dodge the fact that AlphaZero was running on million dollar hardware with a couple of thousand cores, while Stockfish was running on just 64 cores with 1 GB hash. You can actually buy the hardware that Stockfish was running on. Try to buy 4 Google TPUs. If you can afford that you don't need to worry about this topic anymore.
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The guy writing this blog has absolutely no idea how AlphaZero works btw, from his previous post on the subject
You may have noticed that the difference between both articles is that the second one is based on the Giraffe-papers which go into detail on the process, while the first one was based on the AlphaGo-paper only where lots of questions were still open.
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Why take seriously the writings of someone on AlphaZero when he doesn't know the most basic things about how it functions? His implication that AlphaZero is just a more powerful version of Giraffe is also completely wrong, by the way. The only similarity between the two is that they both use machine learning. Giraffe was taught from human games and its neural nets were structured in a domain-specific way
So instead we should take your opinion seriously, because you know all the details. You know that there are self-learning neural nets and there are better self-learning nets. Both know nothing but the rules and do nothing but playing against each other, but one does it clearly better. You should read Animal Farm.
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AlphaZero learnt from scratch, playing itself, and its neural network was not specifically structured to handle chess. This is a good place to point out that the breakthrough here is not that Google made a chess engine which is stronger than Stockfish. The breakthrough is how it works and how it was done.
Exactly, except for the part with the breakthrough. The guy who developed Giraffe was working on AlphaZero. The concept is virtually identical, except for the NASA-type of hardware used by Google. I give you one point though: Matthew Lai - working for the 400 million dollar company DeepMind - probably got very good support by excellent programmers. Some solutions are probably more elegant and more efficient too. I mean there should be something worth the money, right?
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Your second article is in English without needing to be translated here. I'm not sure what in it I need to refute though.
Here is the original article:
https://de.chessbase.com/post/alpha-...ns-mit-aepfeln
Btw, I have no problems with arguments ad hominem, because this is the internet after all. You got very angry though, that has to be admitted. If you can channel this ability you should seek a job as paid astroturfer. Companies are looking for such people. Jobs like that are the future. Sorry, couldn't resist
Last edited by Shandrax; 12-18-2017 at 07:09 AM.