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Comment by mtgp1000 | Hacker News Reader

I don't know anything about Julia...how hard would this be to port to python or a c-style language?

Edit: I was mainly asking because I was curious about the relative expressiveness Julia...

I was going through this project over the weekend. And while I can't recall where exactly in the docs I read this, I am quite sure the author mentioned that there are various python projects but they are quite slow. Other implementations such as leela chess zero have a lot of C++ and are difficult to follow.

In fact, one of the things we want to do is maximize the performance of the Julia implementation. We hope to co-develop the compiler and ML stack to address these issues as they come up.

I don't know if you saw it here, but a similar point is made in the readme section "Why should I care about this implementation".[1]

https://github.com/jonathan-laurent/AlphaZero.jl#why-should-...

Truly truly thank you for your work <3

Not sure you are thanking jonath_laurent (original author of package of discussion) or ViralBShah (co-creator of Julia). But I concur on both accounts :D

Viral. I thanked Jonath in a different post :-P

When I see projects like this (I mean especially Julia, but also people sharing their work on packages like this) I feel very fortunate that elements of the free software movement are still alive.

There are already implementations out there in Python. [1]

The point of that project is to be a very fast alternative to those implementations while being more accessible than a C++ implementation.

[1] https://github.com/suragnair/alpha-zero-general

Why would you? Julia shines in this use case.

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