Comment by ijustlovemath
Comment by ijustlovemath 4 days ago
Deep blue had to use the techniques it did due to the limitations of the hardware of the time. Deep blue would almost certainly lose against AlphaZero, even if you tuned it to modern hardware. All you have to do 'manually' is teach it the rules/give it a loss function, then you just let it do its thing.
It's certainly true that "just throw a bunch of GPUs at it" is wasteful, but it does achieve results.
Certainly does! We’ve had expert systems and various AI techniques for decades that weren’t efficient enough to run even though theoretically they would yield answers.
And even though solutions to many such problems were in the NP or NP-hard categories it didn’t mean that we couldn’t get useful results.
But it still gave us better results by applying what we know about search strategies and reinforcement to provide guidance and heuristics. Even Alpha didn’t use the most general algorithms and throw hardware at the problem. Still took quite a lot of specialized software and methods to fine-tune the overall system to produce the results we want.