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How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

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

#111

Post by tech-historian »

Achieving a new breakthrough in computing is often very expensive. Deep Blue is estimated to cost IBM over $100 million over a decade [1].

And in comparison to large tech company R&D budgets, the amount cited in the article is a drop in the bucket. Consider the fact that Google spent $26 billion in R&D budget in 2019 alone [2]. Microsoft spent almost $17 billion [3].

[1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/76552-project-deep-bli...

[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/507858/alphabet-google-r...

[3] https://www.statista.com/statistics/267806/expenditure-on-re...

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

#112

Post by CydeWeys »

conistonwater wrote: post #5

Are they using the on-demand price instead of the preemptible price? It seems like the sort of job that can run on preemptible machines, just because it's a batch job. Also, should the cost really be calculated using public market prices at all, as opposed to the running costs of the TPUs? It is not guaranteed at all that the opportunity cost to Google of using all those TPUs is equal to the price that you or I would…

Like you, I suspect there are substantial bulk discounts available if you're using tens of millions of dollars worth of these.

I don't know how much less, but if you were to do fully pre-emptible at this scale I wouldn't be surprised if you could get it down to one-tenth the price. I wouldn't suspect the same of other more generic resources like CPUs that have a much lower price point to begin with, but the TPU sticker price seems very high with lots of headroom.

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

#113

Post by andrepd »

luisvictoria wrote: post #99
air7 wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is human&computer better than computer only?

Not really, humans barely provide insight (if anything), which chess engines don’t already consider. Deep Blue could evaluate 200 million different moves... per second. And that’s from 1997. The few and rare times an engine gets funky is usually in end-game positions where the engine can’t seem to find a sacrifice to win the game and will output a current position as drawn. These cases are few and I very much doubt t…

>Deep Blue could evaluate 200 million different moves... per second. And that’s from 1997.

And still he lost against Kasparov. Which doesn't happen now, top engines haven't been beaten by humans since ~2006.

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

#114

Post by sukilot »

tech-historian wrote: post #111

Achieving a new breakthrough in computing is often very expensive. Deep Blue is estimated to cost IBM over $100 million over a decade [1]. And in comparison to large tech company R&D budgets, the amount cited in the article is a drop in the bucket. Consider the fact that Google spent $26 billion in R&D budget in 2019 alone [2]. Microsoft spent almost $17 billion [3]. [1] https://www.extremetech.com/computing/76552-pr…

Note that everything in software development is R&D. Building (not operating) Gmail and Android and Office and Azure are R&D.

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

#115

Post by sukilot »

nl wrote: post #107
mikorym wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK Garry Kasparov to this day does computer&human vs. computer&human chess research, and it's far from a solved problem.

If by "it's far from a solved problem" you mean that chess isn't a solved game that's true. But Kasparov and others have given up on the idea that a human provides any unique insight into chess anymore. Computers are just better.

That's absurd. He works on human+chess research. He obviously hasn't given up on human insight.

What he has given up on is a single human beating a computer.

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

#116

Post by sukilot »

visarga wrote: post #60
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 pop…

AlphaGo is the result of human evolution too.

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

#117

Post by nl »

sukilot wrote: post #115
nl wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If by "it's far from a solved problem" you mean that chess isn't a solved game that's true. But Kasparov and others have given up on the idea that a human provides any unique insight into chess anymore. Computers are just better.

That's absurd. He works on human+chess research. He obviously hasn't given up on human insight. What he has given up on is a single human beating a computer.

I haven't seen any recent (last 5 years or so) articles by him showing he's doing any work on it. There's a few recent articles where he talks about how humans should work with machine learning, but nothing specific.

When he recently came out of chess retirement he didn't talk about it at all in either 2017 or 2019:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/07/06/king-back-chess-...

https://www.theguardian.com/sport/2019/sep/06/chess-leonard-...

There's nothing recent about him on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_chess

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

#118

Post by brilee »

sorenbouma wrote: post #80

I might be wrong, but I think this cost calculation is way off: Their running cost estimate of a single TPU in a machine with 4 "TPUs" is based off the price of a cloud TPU v2-8, but a v2-8 is actually 4 ASICS on 1 board. Also, because of the date of publication being around the time v2s were announced, and the fact that the TPU is only used for inference and GPU is used for training, I think self play was likely don…

Making one move requires 1600 MCTS playouts to explore the game tree, so it's a 1600-1 correspondence of "forward pass" and "move played".

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

#119

Post by JamesBarney »

air7 wrote: post #93
mikorym wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK Garry Kasparov to this day does computer&human vs. computer&human chess research, and it's far from a solved problem.

Is human&computer better than computer only?

No.

Computers are now as much better than Magnus Carlsen as he is better than a moderate amateur.

If even the best player overrides a move he's much more likely to be reducing the strength of the move than increasing it.

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

#120

Post by Symmetry »

ipsum2 wrote: post #2

Alpha Go Zero*, which was trained from scratch, without human games. I've also heard rumors that AlphaStar ( https://deepmind.com/blog/article/alphastar-mastering-real-t... ) was essentially put on hold because it was too expensive to improve/train. The bot wasn't able to beat StarCraft champions and _only_ got to a grandmaster level.

Alpha Go Zero used a combination of deep learning within a classical AI Monte Carlo simulation framework. Without a similarly effective framework its not surprising that Alpha Star wasn't able to achieve similar success. I've watched a lot of Alpha Star replays and the lapses in forethought glare through pretty regularly, though other aspects of its judgement (not just reflexes!) seem frankly super human.
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