There's a single machine version, which beats the distributed version 30% of the time. That should be plenty strong to be useful.
Re:AlphaGo beats Lee Sedol 3-0 [video]
by tunichtgut on Saturday March 12, 2016 @07:10AM
(#11272534)
This hardware setup is crazy. Given alone 280 GPUs is insane.
I wonder if Google will make it available to pros outside these official matches. It's not that Deep Blue played so much after winning with Kasparov in 1997, right? Kasparov asked a rematch and IBM refused. Deep Blue never played again.
Our computers are stronger than it now, mainly thanks to advances in the algorithms. Deep Blue used to crunch many more positions per second than the current chess engines do on standard PC. Still they're stronger. AlphaGo is running on 1920 CPUs and 280 GPUs, so either research trims down its algorithms or we wait for CPUs with 1024 cores. But at the current size they won't fit below the keyboard of a laptop :-)