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

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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