On Sun, 2008-08-10 at 11:37 -0700, Bob Hearn wrote: > Now, my question. Sorry if this has already been beaten to death here. > After the match, one of the MoGo programmers mentioned that doubling > the computation led to a 63% win rate against the baseline version, > and that so far this scaling seemed to continue as computation power > increased. > > So -- quick back-of-the-envelope calculation, tell me where I am > wrong. 63% win rate = about half a stone advantage in go. So we need > 4x processing power to increase by a stone. At the current rate of > Moore's law, that's about 4 years. Kim estimated that the game with > MoGo would be hard at 8 stones. That suggests that in 32 years a > supercomputer comparable to the one that played in this match would be > as strong as Kim.
> This calculation is optimistic in assuming that you can meaningfully > scale the 63% win rate indefinitely, especially when measuring > strength against other opponents, and not a weaker version of itself. > It's also pessimistic in assuming there will be no improvement in the > Monte Carlo technique. > > But still, 32 years seems like a surprisingly long time, much longer > than the 10 years that seems intuitively reasonable. Naively, it would > seem that improvements in the Monte Carlo algorithms could gain some > small number of stones in strength for fixed computation, but that > would just shrink the 32 years by maybe a decade. > > How do others feel about this? 10 years in my opinion is not reasonable. 20 years would be a better estimate. We are probably looking at 20 - 30 years for a desktop player of this strength. And I assume that the MCTS will continue to be refined and improved. Another factor is that Kim could easily be off by a stone or two in either direction - but since he won 2 fast games I would guess that once he got used to playing Mogo he could win consistently with 8 stones - but this is only my guess of course. My estimate may sound pessimistic to some, but this same wild exuberance happened in chess with the famous Levy bet. 10 years later Levy beat the computer winning the bet and 10 more years later he won again. And Levy was not a Grandmaster, he was an international master. - Don > > I guess I should also go on record as believing that if it really does > take 32 years, we *will* have general-purpose AI before then. _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
