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Comment by malanj | Hacker News Reader

Is running AlphaGo really that expensive? I get that training deep learning systems is very computationally expensive, but my understanding is that running them is orders of magnitude cheaper.

edit: table showing gains as CPUs are added - https://i.imgur.com/xxdWUtV.png

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It's a huge cluster of machines.

Got any numbers?

The Economist says "The version playing against Mr Lee uses 1,920 standard processor chips and 280 special ones developed originally to produce graphics for video games"

So, that's actually not very expensive to rent for the duration of five games.

I don't know how long a game takes but I don't think google could afford letting anybody play, as stated in the original post.

Charge $1000 per game and pay out $10,000 if the human wins. Could be a nice earner. ;)

I'll pay for two simultaneous sessions of AlphaGo please :). I'll even let it go first in one of them!

Clever, but they could easily detect this on their servers.

It would be nice if they preserve a snap shot of Alphago as it was a the start of the Sedol games as a historic thing. Then if they open source it people could go play it too. They have mostly open sourced their code but not I think the learning data.

They would only need to open the learned coefficients, not the data learned from.

I like the way you think. :D

If you price by the GCE calculator[0] it's $1920 to rent 1920 CPU cores for 20 hours. This doesn't include GPU costs as they don't seem to have GPUs available on cloud, but I could see that easily doubling the costs.

[0] https://cloud.google.com/products/calculator/#id=f63f1fe0-56...

Daresay the Economist is unclear whether they are talking chips or cores so it could be several times more cores.

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