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Comment by srean | Hacker News Reader

One aspect that I miss in these conversations is that of energy use. Brain sure is a energy hungry organ in our body but it still quite small compared to say IBM's Watson. In this particular case I agree with Chomsky. Watson is as impressive as a huge steam roller. I am positively impressed by Watson, but I want to be impressed on different axes as well.

I am curious if a program running on a energy limited device would be able to beat a high ranked chess grandmaster in a standard competition setting (by that I mean the same rules about time etc). My hunch is that the answer is still a resounding no.

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My hunch is that the answer is still a resounding no

Not only yes, but Chess engines have been getting better over time as well as new algorithmic advancements have been discovered. Such that a smartphone running a modern engine can beat a full fledged multi-core PC running an older engine.

Note that the Elo for the smartphone used in this example is estimated at about 3000 vs the 2851 of Magnus Carlsen.

http://en.chessbase.com/post/komodo-8-the-smartphone-vs-desk...

Indeed, and its been a pleasant surprise to learn about the state of the art as of now.

First we have to invent a computer - any computer, no matter how big - that can actually replicate the intelligence of a human. Then we can start making it more efficient, smaller, and so on, which is the history of computers.

My guess is it will be a few more decades, probably at least three, before we're able to do that.

I tried to talk about this before in pre-ghost-town LessWrong, but the commenters didn't seem to like it: < http://lesswrong.com/lw/7n1/watts_son/ >.

What happened to lesswrong?

chess grandmaster can easily be beat by a smartphone app (komodo), is smartphone using more energy than a human brain?

the problem with Go is that there's little data and the game is more complex - but given the small sizes of the deepmind NNs if they generate billions of meaningful games, they could probably compress their model and require less searching thus less energy

> chess grandmaster can easily be beat by a smartphone app (komodo), is smartphone using more energy than a human brain?

I would think a smart phone consumes less power than the brain (more so if you can turn off the display appropriately). I could be wrong though. BTW does all of the komodo logic reside on the client side or some of it executes on the off-client backend ?

The logic is on the phone.

An adult male needs around 2500 kcal per day. This works out to 2906Wh. The battery in a Nexus 5 is around 8Wh, for comparison. The question then becomes: how many hours would the battery last running the Komodo 9 engine full-out?

That would be an interesting matchup. I bet a grandmaster could play slow enough to kill the battery on the phone. A human could go a day without eating no problem. There's no way the phone could go a day without charging while running 100% CPU.

Why on earth would the phone be running the chess engine 24/7 ? It only has to run the engine when it needs to select its next move.

Traditional chess applications are "thinking" while waiting for you to move. That's not to say they can't be sleeping while waiting for your move, but it would just delay the game tempo and possibly (slightly) limit the overall competency of the chess AI.

Not slightly, greatly.

Speculative move generation of a chess engine on opponent time is a huge part of the overall strength especially when the engine can see a forced move therby collapsing the tree.

A normal chess match last about 4 hours. If we divide proportionally the energy of the day, that will be about 400Wh. I remember a factoid that says that the brain consume the 20% of the energy of the body at rest (less % while running) (more % while thinking?), so if we cut the unnecessary stuff [0] that will be 80Wh, i.e. 10 batteries. Probably the phone is more efficient.

[0] Don't try this at home.

So 10 batteries... how long do you think the engine could last on one battery? Then we multiply that number by 10 and see if it's less than 4 hours... hmmm

Meh, if you're scraping the bottom of that barrel, you can turn that around and talk about development time. Things always get smaller and more efficient with computers, and they've only been with us for 80-odd years. Humans are a much more mature 'technology', sure, but they've been around for tens of thousands of years.g

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