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by -__---____-ZXyw 413 days ago
> DeepMind have some history here so I reserve the right to be skeptical.

What history of cheating is there? I hadn't seen anything sneaky, but I don't follow everything. Do share.

1 comments

The AlphaZero paper claimed it was vastly superior to Stockfish, the top open source engine, based on a 100-game match against Stockfish. It turned out Stockfish was running with way less compute. It's not an apples to apples comparison between CPU and GPU, but IIRC there were orders of magnitude difference in the hardware cost and power budget. Additionally, they used a build of Stockfish that was tuned based on having access to opening books and endgame tablebases, but didn't give it those resources in the match.

The original AlphaStar announcement was also based on having serious advantages over its human opponents: it got a feed of the whole map, where humans could only view a section at a time, and the ability to perform an unrealistic number of actions per minute.

The equivalent in table tennis? Maybe having an additional high speed camera on the other side of the table, or a sensor in the opponent's bat. Actually, why is the opponent playing with a non-standard bat with two black rubbers? Presumably that's an optimization where the robot's computer vision has been tuned only for a black bat. But if that's so, it means none of the opponents got to use their own equipment, they used a bat which was unfamiliar and perhaps chosen to be easy for the robot to play against.