[wowzer]

While what the AlphaGo team has accomplished is nothing short of amazing, I'm not sure if everyone's thinking about this in the right context. While playing there's a "super computer" behind the scenes with these specs 1,920 CPUs and 280 GPUs [0]. Then consider all the machines used to train this neural net. I'd say Sedol's brain is pretty freaking powerful. Also, with that much computing power I would expect AlphaGo to win with the right team and the right approach to solving the problem. It would be very interesting to change the rules and limit the processing power of the computer playing a human.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo

[chillacy]

You can make AlphaGo stronger by adding machines, you can't make Sedol stronger by gluing more gray matter in his brain (yet I guess). So yea, efficiency is nice but so is scalability, and that's why this is exciting.

Also in a few years AlphaGo could be running on your cellphone. The chess AI Stockfish runs on an iphone today, and cellphones from what I could find online, uses less power than the brain (brain is roughly 20W, iphone has 1.4Wh battery which even if stockfish drains in 1 hour, is still 1W of power consumption)

Give it a few years and we'll all be saying "of course computers can play Go, but at least they can't <Insert task humans are still good at>"

[xzephyr]

These CPU/GPUs are doing very inefficient digital simulations of analogue processes. If anything, human brain has significantly more 'processing power' than Alpha Go when you restrict the computation to the activation of linear threshold units.