How long until a computer beats a pro -- any pro -- in an even game?
How long until a computer can routinely beat the best pros?
Not a very scientific poll, I realize, but I'd like some numbers to
use in my AAAS talk on Saturday.
FWIW, this is a back-of-the-envelope calculation I did in August, when
MoGo beat Myungwan Kim 8p at H9:
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.
Thanks,
Bob Hearn
---------------------------------------------
Robert A. Hearn
Neukom Institute for Computational Science, Dartmouth College
robert.a.he...@dartmouth.edu
http://www.dartmouth.edu/~rah/
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