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How much did AlphaGo Zero cost? (2018)

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

#71

Post by simonh »

PeterisP wrote: post #56
simonh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Oops, my mistake. Thanks for the correction.

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

#72

Post by phonon »

sabas123 wrote: post #21
NVHacker wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The goal was never to beat all pros. https://deepmind.com/blog/article/AlphaStar-Grandmaster-leve...

on a side note, I'm still disappointed to see that they didn't improve on the EAPM restriction to truly show they can beat humans without machine-y advantages. Still what they have accomplished is a miracle.

The version that later went on ladder anonymously used human-like E/APM.

https://storage.googleapis.com/deepmind-media/research/alpha...

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

#73

Post by imtringued »

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.

I don't remember the name but I definitively saw attempts to build a general AI that was designed to solve 50 different games. There was one long learning phase where the AI learns mechanics that are common to all of the 50 games and then there is a much shorter learning phase that is just specific to a single game. Same attempt was made with a Minecraft bot. First it just learned how to live and interact in a vanilla world. Then it was fed twitch pvp livestreams and finally it was placed in a pvp server. It didn't perform super well but watching the livestreams was definitively more efficient than learning combat from scratch.

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

#74

Post by nl »

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…

This is... wrong?

Scratching a face is a matter of fine motor control. [1] is an example from 2011 which did this, as well as face shaving.

Walking is slightly tricky because it's such a dynamic system, but is now human level[2], and there was never really any question that it would be possible.

On the other hand, the state of the art in Go systems before Alpha Go (the one trained off games, not Alpha Zero) couldn't beat competent amateurs. No one had really considered the learn-from-zero-knowledge approach of Alpha Zero even for easier games like chess.

[1] https://www.engadget.com/2011-07-14-robots-for-humanity-help...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E

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

#75

Post by conistonwater »

Certhas wrote: post #39
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…

The article actually addresses that. The precise number is not the point but the ballpark is: "In terms of actual cost to DeepMind (a subsidiary of Google’s parent company) to run the experiment, there are other factors that need to be taken into account, such as researcher salaries, or that the quoted TPU rate probably includes a healthy amount of margin. But for someone outside Google, this number is a good ballpar…

KataGo and Leela Zero and all the other AIs certainly didn't cost that much (the people running them wouldn't have had that much money and resources) and are probably stronger than Alpha Go Zero. I don't think it's at all fair to say this number is a good ballpark estimate of how much it would cost to replicate this experiment. It's wrong as a calculation of Google's costs, it's wrong per the title How much did AlphaGo Zero cost, and it's also wrong as an estimate of the cost of replication.

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

#76

Post by nl »

simiones wrote: post #64
PeterisP wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Do we have algorithms that allow bipedal robots to walk at human level ? Or run at, let's say, 10th grade standard student level?

Yes.

Here's Boston Dynamic's robot doing Parkour and gymnastics: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_sBBaNYex3E

It's not national level gymnastics but it's better co-ordinated than most humans.

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

#77

Post by thomasahle »

29athrowaway wrote: post #13
irjustin wrote: post #4

Alpha Go Zero inspired the development of an open source version, Leela Go Zero which Leela Chess Zero is forked from by the same guy who made Stock Fish. Lots of people contribute what I imagine are amounts of CPU Power/money to the Leela Chess Zero project[1]. Would love to see Alpha Chess vs Leela Chess. [1] https://training.lczero.org/ [edit] I've caused terrible confusion by melding Leela Go and Leela Chess when…

I think KataGo is stronger than Leela Zero. https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo

I was suspecting another boring clone, but Kata looks like a cool project with nice new ideas! Thanks for sharing

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

#78

Post by username90 »

PeterisP wrote: post #67
simiones wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do we have algorithms that allow bipedal robots to walk at human level ? Or run at, let's say, 10th grade standard student level?

Bipedal walking and running on uneven terrain has been demonstrated years ago - Boston Dynamics has a lot of nice videos; e.g. here's a four year old video on walking https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rVlhMGQgDkY , here's two year old videos on running https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjSohj-Iclc and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LikxFZZO2sk - perhaps it's debatable if it's "full human level" but it seems sufficient t…

> it seems sufficient to me for most purposes.

Current self driving car technology is sufficient for most purposes, except to actually drive on roads. So for those walking robots, can they run or even walk through a crowd without hitting people? A normal 15 year old human can do it, and that is the level you need to be to release it among people.

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

#79

Post by qayxc »

conistonwater wrote: post #75
Certhas wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article actually addresses that. The precise number is not the point but the ballpark is: "In terms of actual cost to DeepMind (a subsidiary of Google’s parent company) to run the experiment, there are other factors that need to be taken into account, such as researcher salaries, or that the quoted TPU rate probably includes a healthy amount of margin. But for someone outside Google, this number is a good ballpar…

KataGo and Leela Zero and all the other AIs certainly didn't cost that much (the people running them wouldn't have had that much money and resources) and are probably stronger than Alpha Go Zero. I don't think it's at all fair to say this number is a good ballpark estimate of how much it would cost to replicate this experiment . It's wrong as a calculation of Google's costs, it's wrong per the title How much did Alph…

> KataGo and Leela Zero and all the other AIs certainly didn't cost that much

And you base that claim on what exactly? Leela Go is trained by the community, which donates self-play resources. Just because you outsource your cost to volunteers doesn't mean it's free!

In order to get to a realistic estimation, you'd need to get the average cost for electricity, hardware cost (proportionate to use), and of course opportunity costs.

Since you cannot do that, I'd argue that you have no clue what the true training cost of these projects compared to on-demand/cloud costs really are.

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

#80

Post by sorenbouma »

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 done on TPU v1s, which use 5x less power per ASIC and so are likely much cheaper

I also think the way they calculated the number of TPUs required is wrong, it looks like they assume 1 machine with 4 TPUs makes 1 move in 0.4 seconds, but since making 1 move only requires a forwards pass through a moderately sized CNN with 19x19(tiny) input, 1 TPU should be able to make thousands of moves in parallel per second.

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