I'm not in a position to read the paper right now, so my apologies if that's covered in there. I want to ask just in case it's not, while this is still on the front page.
Leela zero (the main alphago zero replication project) is a crowd sourced computation effort that's going to take a fairly long time to get anywhere.
And from this paper: > "Training proceeded for 700,000 steps (mini-batches of size 4,096) starting from randomly initialised parameters, using 5,000 first-generation TPUs (15) to generate self-play games and 64 second-generation TPUs to train the neural networks."
>"Why is the net wired randomly?", asked Minsky. "I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play", Sussman said. Minsky then shut his eyes. "Why do you close your eyes?", Sussman asked his teacher. "So that the room will be empty." At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.
As for that koan, I'm not convinced it's very applicable here. My interpretation of the koan is that the entire setup (training process, structure, etc.) all encode domain knowledge. In this case, I think AlphaZero's domain knowledge is transferable enough that I don't think it's relevant.