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0 pointsjeremysalwen7y ago0 comments

Time handicaps are supposed to correspond to handicaps in computational power. But here according to the paper AlphaZero is running on ~100 teraFLOPS, but the stockfish machine has about 1 teraFLOP (my best estimate based on https://www.microway.com/knowledge-center-articles/detailed-...). So 100:1 time control would be fair from a computational perspective (of course comparing the computational power used is more subtle than the rough calculation I did here).

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4 comments · 2 top-level

FartyMcFarter7y ago· 2 in thread

As far as I know, FLOPS are mostly meaningless for traditional chess engines. They don't really use floating point operations much or at all.

jeremysalwenOP7y ago

I know, but it still gives you a rough measure of the amount of silicon used.

FartyMcFarter7y ago

I don't think so. For example, GPUs have way more TFLOPS per area than CPUs.

aurelwu7y ago

AlphaZero used a few ( I think 4 TPUs) on top of the same or roughly same CPU Count, which is not that outrageous. I think the most fair comparison would be to pick a configuration for AZ and Stockfish which uses roughly the same amount of power and is best suited for each one respectively.

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