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A comment on The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo. Parent comment

Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by _yosefk on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @03:57AM (#14399635)
No problem beating most humans already. Beating the best human? How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human? Such humans are rare so you ought to count all the others as part of the cost of making the best human as you can't quite make them on demand (though Laslo Polgar might disagree).

I don't get the energy point. The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7. Doesn't that count for something?

But your wish will come true. Go isn't a special snowflake. If you have an objective metric of success in a formal universe machines always win.

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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by al_chemist on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:12AM (#14399695)
> How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human?

By your definition, on AI side we should add energy spent on creating AI and civilization that produced it.

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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by jayd16 on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:35AM (#14399778)
I think he's amortizing the cost to zero for the AI because the marginal cost per additional AI is much lower than the cost to sustain a civilization to churn out and bin human go players.
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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by piyush_soni on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:19AM (#14399729)
And also, there's a certain amount of 'healthcare' cost involved like with all other computers.
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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by Cybiote on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @08:51AM (#14400709)
Your point is not very different from those who say AlphaGo's is really a human victory because human teams built it. Such a distinction based on a historical trace is not a useful one to make. Similarly, the sum total of energy a modern human in a developed society has available to it is not an insightful observation to make when talking about playing Go. It is more a reflection of a civilization's wealth. The best humans from 100, perhaps even 500 years ago would still give almost all modern humans and computers a very hard time. In fact, computers are even more dependent on a technological society (and so more dependent on a large number of humans) than humans are.

The discussion is energy use at play time. For each given second, a certain number of joules are being used to compute a decision. That number as of today, in an unaided match, is independent of civilization's technological state.

That said, AlphaGo has seen a huge (10x?) gain in efficiency according to David Silver. Still far from a human but nonetheless very impressive drop in just a year.

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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by darkerside on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @07:20AM (#14400325)
> If you have an objective metric of success in a formal universe machines always win. More like, machines will eventually win given enough time and effort put forth into making it so by humans. At least, so far.
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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by taneq on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @07:08PM (#14406224)
This is my argument for universal basic income. The true cost of your hyper-effective, top-0.1% employees isn't just their salaries, it's the cost of the entire society that raised them.
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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by georgyo on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:31AM (#14399763)
Assuming 2000 calories/day, a human averages 97 Watts/hour.

Ke Jie is currently 19, so he has used an estimate of 670kWH for both his training set and playing his games.

Getting a machine to win that consumes less than 97W/H would be hard.

Taking a new machine and loading training data on it and having it win would be far less than 670kWH

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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by dragonwriter on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:41AM (#14399799)
> Assuming 2000 calories/day, a human averages 97 Watts/hour.

97W, not 97W/h.

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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by Sharlin on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:41AM (#14399802)
> Watts/hour

Watts is already "per hour", mind. Or per second to be precise.

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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by 21 on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @06:22AM (#14400138)
Why is electricity then measured in kW/h?

In my understanding, power (instantaneous) is measured in W, but consumption needs to be integrated over time, thus the per hour part.

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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by z0k on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @06:29AM (#14400161)
It's not kW/h, it's kWh https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kilowatt_hour
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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by TeMPOraL on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @08:06AM (#14400508)
Which is kW * h, i.e. kilowatt times hours, like man-hours are number of men multiplied by time.
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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by Sharlin on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @07:23AM (#14400332)
kW/h would be a unit of the derivative of power, measuring the rate at which power consumption changes.
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Re:The Future of Go Summit – Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo by dogecoinbase on Tuesday May 23, 2017 @04:26AM (#14399753)
How much energy goes into creating a civilization that produces that human?

Did... you really just say that, about a process that requires not only a civilization, but one sufficiently decadent that it can afford to waste resources making silicon that turns burned coal into pointless game victories?

The machine has no health care costs and can play 24/7.

I think by your previous metrics, you should be counting the heathcare costs of the ops folks who run the hardware, and I guess the healthcare costs of their healthcare workers, ad nauseum.

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