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A comment on Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinforcement Learning. Parent comment

Re:Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinf... by cdancette on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @03:59AM (#15859656)
But how many "cpu hours" of human work were used to design stockfish? You can't really compare that.

Some scientist say the brain has a power of several petaflops, so if you use this, I guess the design of stockfish was way less efficient.

You can't really compare things to cpu years, it doesn't make sense. Power consumption would be a better metric I think.

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Re:Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinf... by CydeWeys on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @06:25AM (#15860276)
The best metric is total cost, including the cost of the hardware as well as the electricity. It might be worth prorating the hardware by the amount of time it spends on the task, too, assuming the hardware is general enough for many purposes (like TPUs are), vs say something like EFF's DES cracker which was not.
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Re:Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinf... by gwern on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @11:31AM (#15862389)
A ton of CPU has gone into Stockfish, if only for their distributed computing project fishnet: http://tests.stockfishchess.org/tests
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Re:Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinf... by gwern on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @02:57PM (#15864402)
To be a little more precise: Stockfish has used >5,667,382 CPU-hours (5.6 million CPU-hours) adding up just the participants who contributed >10,000 CPU-hours according to https://github.com/mcostalba/Stockfish/blob/master/Top%20CPU...
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Re:Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinf... by nojvek on Thursday December 07, 2017 @08:45AM (#15869882)
Yes but that's training time. At runtime AlphaZero got magnitudes more computation power than stockfish.

A more fair comparison would be use as much computation needed for training but for runtime, use equal wattage hardware.

E.g 20W of cpu in mobile phone running stockfish to 20W of GPU in nvidia TX2 running AlphaZero to 20W human brain.

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