Okay, I will bite. It uses less training cycles. Why is that not significant? Both AlphaZero and MuZero are brute force, but MuZero is less brute force than AlphaZero, so it's heading in the right direction.
Sure, but both of them are more brute force than Deep Blue (unless anybody has a compelling counter argument), so we’re actually heading in the wrong direction.
AlphaZero evaluates comparably less positions per second than Deep Blue. It doesn't even reach 100k nodes per seconds of I remember correctly, while Deep Blue was in the millions[1]. Therefore, even though the training is done by brute force, the evaluation is way less "brute forcing" in AlphaZero than in Deep Blue.
Not just Stockfish on modern hardware can evaluate fewer nodes than Deep Blue and still beat it left and right; in 1995 Fritz on a Pentium was able to beat Deep Thought II at the world chess championship. Deep Blue and its ancestors, with their custom hardware, were perhaps the "most brute force" of all chess engines.
As you yourself point out, the brute force here refers to solving a problem by throwing more hardware at it.
Number of nodes searched is not the key metric for gauging how “smart” the algorithm is. You have less nodes searched but you only got there by having way more upfront processing.
It should be pointed out AlphaZero plays better than Deep Blue. I think comparing computational resource usage is important, but direct comparison only makes sense with equivalent performance level.
> This makes no sense to me. 50% increase in performance can be compared to 50% increase in processing power to evaluate level of brute force-ness.
Computational complexity theory taught us that fundamental difficulty of solving specific types of problems does not always linearly scale with the size of the problems. I guess the same logic applies to the quality of the output?
I mean that ELO is not linear and there is no obvious ratio operation for ELO scores. How much is better than 2,600? Is it 5,200? Is it the rating at which you'd have 2:1 odds of winning a match? (Wikipedia says 200 points represent 74% chance of winning, so somewhere below 2,800) There's just no commonly agreed meaning of "50% better Chess player".
