I think this estimate is a reasonable educated guess. The uncertainties are quite big. I would say your estimate has a total margin of error of at least 50% (it will probably take between 15 years and 50 years) but I don't think it's possible to estimate much more accurate at this stage. Dave
________________________________ Van: computer-go-boun...@computer-go.org namens Bob Hearn Verzonden: vr 13-2-2009 6:42 Aan: computer-go Onderwerp: [computer-go] Poll: how long until computers are as strong as pros? 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/ _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
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