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How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

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Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#51

Post by PeterisP »

jaekash wrote: post #50

> This accomplishment is truly remarkable in that it shows that we can develop systems that teach themselves to do non-trivial tasks from a blank slate, and eventually become better than humans at doing the task. "non-trivial" is a bit of a red herring here. Playing go is pretty trivial compared to something like walking or scratching your face. Winning go may be non-trivial compared to those in some ways but it is v…

Playing go at that level is non-trivial compared to walking because (a) most humans can walk, but not even the best human go masters can play go at that level; (b) we had algorithms that allow bipedal robots to walk long before we had algorithms for playing go at that level.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#53

Post by hobofan »

RobertoG wrote: post #22
zucker42 wrote: post #11

I wonder if the code and network weights will ever see the light of day. I wonder what the eventual value proposition of working on this sort of stuff is. I suppose they are just going to try to apply the algorithms to better things. I've been interested in the application of AlphaZero to chess. It's sad that this many resources were devoted to something which we can't even use to play chess as of now. Leela (the ope…

>>" I wonder what the eventual value proposition of working on this sort of stuff is." It seems to me that, if you only take it as a marketing operation, it has been already very valuable.

I'd really love to know how big the marketing impact on IBM Watson from this was. Somehow they managed to put the idea that "Watson is the best available AI" so well in the heads of then general population that 50%+ of my non-tech friends somehow thought that Watson beat the Go pros when I was talking with them about the topic when it was in the news.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#54

Post by vadarvariu »

Now, consider that this is the cost of the final model reported in the paper. This doesn't account for all the iterations of trying out e.g. different model architectures, hyperparameter sweeps, etc. The true cost of the experimentation is likely at least an order of magnitude higher.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#55

Post by has2k1 »

rurban wrote: post #38

Misleading numbers, and wrong calculations. The TPU and CPU cost them almost nothing as they use and build them anyway, and renting them out for this PR stunt just cost them the missed rental time, if customers would really pay that much. Maybe around 20.000. Energy cost? I don't see much additional costs as those machines run all the time, regardless if improving the model or doing something else. I bet the much hig…

I think it would be helpful for discourse if you read the article in full.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#56

Post by PeterisP »

simonh wrote: post #25
FartyMcFarter wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Go champions don't learn from zero. They learn from teachers, books, and playing against each other. This knowledge is built over hundreds, or thousands of years.

Alphago didn't learn from zero either. It has a pre-processor that identifies sets of patterns with known features, and also: "AlphaGo was initially trained to mimic human play by attempting to match the moves of expert players from recorded historical games, using a database of around 30 million moves".

That's for an earlier system (which also used less compute).

AlphaGo was followed by AlphaGo Zero (which is the topic of this article) which did not use the process that you describe, it used only the rules of the game and the winning condition.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#58

Post by amelius »

andbberger wrote: post #32
phreeza wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This comparison is not entirely fair because the human brain also benefits from priors baked in over the entire course of evolution.

That's a pretty big claim. One could argue that the topology of the brain is a prior, analogous to the architecture of a neural net. But considering that we really have no idea how learning happens in the brain on a large scale, you really can't say.

True, but a spider doesn't figure out how to build a web all by itself. That's to say, there is a lot that evolution can provide us with as a prior.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#59

Post by ramraj07 »

trashburger wrote: post #14

The amount was removed from the submission title, which sucks if you're like me and don't like to visit yet another possibly JS-heavy site and drain your battery. For others: It's $36M.

Are you working off one solar panel on the way to Mars? First time I'm hearing battery drain as a reason to not visit a js site.

Re: How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

#60

Post by visarga »

hjnilsson wrote: post #7

Another way of thinking about how efficient the brain is: By the article’s numbers, about 5.5 million TPU hours were required to train the machine to play as well as a Go champion. A Go champion might have trained for 8 hours a day, for 15 years (age 5 to 20). That is about 40 000 hours. In other words, machines required 137 times longer to learn the game, and at twice the power consumption! There is still a lot of r…

> In other words, machines required 137 times longer to learn the game, and at twice the power consumption!

This comparison is a bit unfair. Humans are the result of evolution on a grand scale. Human Go is the result of millennia of gameplay. A human does not become grand master in isolation.

AlphaGo is the result of an evolutionary tournament style competition of a much smaller duration and breadth. AG is also a population, not just one agent, and it would be silly to take just one agent and evaluate it on its own as if it could be created without the others.

Should we include the human costs as well in AG, why just the electricity and CPU?

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