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arXiv:1902.10565cs.LG

Accelerating Self-Play Learning in Go

David J. Wu

Abstract

By introducing several improvements to the AlphaZero process and architecture, we greatly accelerate self-play learning in Go, achieving a 50x reduction in computation over comparable methods. Like AlphaZero and replications such as ELF OpenGo and Leela Zero, our bot KataGo only learns from neural-net-guided Monte Carlo tree search self-play. But whereas AlphaZero required thousands of TPUs over several days and ELF required thousands of GPUs over two weeks, KataGo surpasses ELF's final model after only 19 days on fewer than 30 GPUs. Much of the speedup involves non-domain-specific improvements that might directly transfer to other problems. Further gains from domain-specific techniques reveal the remaining efficiency gap between the best methods and purely general methods such as AlphaZero. Our work is a step towards making learning in state spaces as large as Go possible without large-scale computational resources.

arXiv comments
28 pages including appendices, 8 figures, 7 tables. Presented at AAAI20-RLG workshop. (this version: updated an email address)
Journal reference
DOI
Subjects
cs.LGMachine Learning stat.MLMachine Learning (Statistics)

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Linked by 6 identifiable commenters in 6 comments across 6 threads, from Nov 2019 to Nov 2022.

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Discussed in comments6 threads

    • From a tweet of one of the authors [1]: "KataGo was trained on Tromp-Taylor rules so we evaluate our attack using this too." This is incorrect. According to the KataGo paper [2], KataGo is trained using modified Tromp-Taylor rules (as pointed out by [3]): "Self play games used…

      carry_bitView on HNParent context

    • I've been working on a Python implementation that uses Gradient Boosted Decision Trees (LightGBM/Treelite) instead of using a neural network for the value/policy models: https://github.com/cgreer/alpha-zero-boosted It's mostly to understand how AlphaZero&Friends work. I'm also…

      cgreerrunView on HNParent context

    • Related demos, repositories, papers and posts: More recent and extensive post: https://blog.janestreet.com/deep-learning-the-hardest-go-pro... Site to play against KataGo: https://online-go.com/player/592684/ Arxiv paper on KataGo design: https://arxiv.org/abs/1902.10565 GitHub…

      jedharrisView on HNParent context

    • He's also wrong about a lot. For all his insistence on accuracy, he himself is misleading or ignorant. Like his slam of the Dartmouth project - even if you knew nothing about it, all you have to do is click through to see the claims of 'solving vision' are sheer projection and…

      gwernView on HNParent context

    • AlphaGo Master, unsurprisingly, was significantly stronger than AlphaGoZero. AlphaZero, although it can play multiple games, was weaker yet. In both cases, they compared the 40 block version of the one with the 20 block version of the other (they had to double the network size…

      codehotterView on HNParent context

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