Google's infrastructure gives it an extra boost, but even the single machine version can beat the distributed version 25% of the time.[1]

[1] https://twitter.com/demishassabis/status/708489093676568576

The nice thing about most of this deep learning stuff is that you can use a million machine hours to train your model, and almost no time to make an evaluation. So the single machine version has all of the pattern recognition given to it by the cluster, but a few ply less tree search depth.

So to me this underscores the relative importance of the deep learning model vs the tree search.

Kind of cool to know (if you're Lee) that your thinking ability is on par with 1920 CPUs and 280 GPUs!

Well, the whole point of this match has been to demonstrate that it is not...

Flip it around: it took 1920 CPUs and 280 GPUs to beat him!

I'd be ecstatic if I could keep GNU Go on 1 CPU from wiping the floor with me... :)

It wouldn't be expensive to rent that much "cloud" hardware for a few hours.

But given the strength of the distributed program, the desktop version is already professional strength because of diminishing returns.