Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinforcement Learning

Re:Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinf... by CydeWeys on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @06:22AM (#15860254)

> In that time I figure they used the equivalent of about 1000 cpu-years.

Are you using some kind of conversion factor from TPUs to CPUs? If so, what is it? And is it valid to do that?

You could convert the amount of time it took to render an hour's worth of gameplay from 1 GPU-hour to 50 CPU-days (or whatever), but is that really meaningful?

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Re:Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinf... by allenz on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @05:50PM (#15865886)

The conversion factor seems to be 1 TPU-hour ~ 500 CPU-hours in terms of flops. We can nitpick that number, but it won't change the conclusion that AlphaZero needs a boatload of compute.

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Re:Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinf... by CydeWeys on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @11:34PM (#15867650)

I don't see how this is relevant though. A GPU also provides graphics rendering performance equivalent to some boatload of CPU-hours, but who cares? GPUs exist and are used for the tasks they are good at. TPU hardware isn't theoretical; it does exist and it is being mass-produced.

Yes, it needs a boatload of very simple compute (8 bit operations), the kind that CPUs are not even close to ideal at providing economically.

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Re:Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinf... by red75prime on Wednesday December 06, 2017 @09:29PM (#15867136)

It needs huge amount of computations to perform a task which previously required a boatload of domain experts' brainpower too.

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