[master_yoda_1]

I am confused about the FAST part, it is faster than all the other implementation (some of them are in c++) or it is just julia implementation and you think it is fast? I am asking because if julia is faster than c++ for ml/dl I would prefer to use it for production use cases.

[jonath_laurent]

This needs clarification indeed. As I explain in the documentation, the aim of AlphaZero.jl is not to compete with hyper-specialized and hyper-optimized implementations such as LC0 or ELF OpenGO. These implementations are written in C++ with custom CUDA kernels and they are optimized for highly distributed computing environments. They are also very complex and therefore pretty inaccessible to students and researchers.

The philosophy of AlphaZero.jl is to provide an implementation of AlphaZero that is simple enough to be widely accessible for students and researchers, while also being sufficiently powerful and fast to enable meaningful experiments on limited computing resources. It has the simplicity of the many existing python implementations, while being consistently between one and two orders of magnitude faster.

More generally, the AlphaZero algorithm is extremely general and I think it can find applications in many research domains (including automated theorem proving, which is my own research area). I have been surprised to see that, despite the general excitement around AlphaZero, very few people actually tried to build on it. One explanation, I think, is the lack of accessible open-source implementations. I am trying to bridge this gap with AlphaZero.jl.

[O_H_E]

Always great to see someone who finds something broken, and fixes it for others to move forward.

Thank you.

[dklend122]

In addition to the excellent answer by the author below, I'd like to say that Julia can get within spitting distance (or even sometimes exceed) C++ speeds (and even BLAS). So if a comparable amount of work went into optimizing specific paths through generic code (or even the generic code itself), it could be as fast. Also, one can write CUDA kernels in pure Julia.

[master_yoda_1]

Looks like I need to start learning julia