How powerful is Google's Go program AlphaGo? 30,000 times more powerful than IBM's Deep Blue

The first match between man and machine Go - Google's Go program AlphaGo and South Korean Lee Sedol is currently in full swing. Facing the 9th dan master Lee Sedol, AlphaGo has the ability to "fight on equal terms". We can't help but ask, as a computer program, how strong is AlphaGo's computing power?

This reminds me of the IBM Deep Blue, which was once famous and shocked the world. Deep Blue is a super chess computer produced by IBM in the United States. It weighs 1,270 kilograms, has 32 brains (microprocessors), can calculate 200 million steps per second, has a computing power of 11.38 GFLOPS, and has input more than 2 million games played by excellent chess players over the past 100 years.

IBM's Deep Blue defeated the world chess champion Kasparov in 1997. Now, the computing power of a laptop has surpassed Deep Blue. Sogou CEO Wang Xiaochuan said that AlphaGo's computing power is 30,000 times that of IBM's Deep Blue . ps. Our country's Tianhe-2 is the world's fastest supercomputer, and its floating point computing power has reached 33.86 PFLOPS, which is 300,000 times that of Deep Blue.

It is understood that AlphaGo has a strong learning ability. It uses the Monte Carlo tree search algorithm, with the help of two deep neural networks, the value network and the policy network, to evaluate a large number of selected points through the value network, and select the placement point through the policy network . The machine initially imitated human players and tried to match the chess games of professional chess players. Once it reached a certain level of proficiency, it began to play a large number of chess games with itself, using reinforcement learning to further improve it.

Some commentators said that if Google's Go program succeeds this time, it will also have great social significance. In the future, it may be able to help people diagnose diseases. For example, by looking at a person's "palm", it can analyze some physical conditions.

There is also a view that it is not terrible for Google's Go program to win against humans, but it is terrible to pretend to lose to humans . It is very scary to think about it...

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.