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Comment by pbkhrv | Hacker News Reader

> If we have a computer program that is able to design better hardware, it can be improved by simply moving it to better hardware.

Could you please elaborate? What is it about "better hardware" that makes software that runs on it "better"? Can you define "better"?

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'Better' as in achieves more results per unit of time. Which is a fundamental problem for humans too. Many do have the intellectual capacity to invent something like general relativity, but few would be capable of doing so in the very limited timeframe we have available and even fewer actually end up doing that instead of dedicating their thinking time somewhere else. More thinking and more output per timeframe should lead to significant improvements for both human and AI in terms of results, which is generally the meaningful part

Hardware that has more memory, more processing speed, faster access to memory, and more parallelism is better than hardware without those characteristics.

The exact same software running on better hardware will run faster and can tackle larger problems.

We can't possibly build a human with twice the memory that thinks twice as fast. However once we have an AI which is roughly equivalent to a human, having an AI with twice as much memory that thinks twice as fast is just 2-5 years. (How long depends on where the bottleneck is.)

Wait, so if I run a Go-playing program from 10 years ago on the AlphaGo cluster then it'll produce better results than it did 10 years ago?

Yes. Nowhere near as good as AlphaGo, but yes it would do better.

When Deep Blue beat Kasparov at chess, the program was not significantly better than what had been state of the art for the previous decade. They just threw enough hardware at it.

For chess programs there is an almost linear relationship between your search depth and effective ELO rating, and search depth went up by a constant with each generation of Moore's law.

For chess programs there is an almost linear relationship between your search depth and effective ELO rating...

Maybe that's why chess has been "solved" by AI, and as of yet no real problems that trouble humanity have?

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