Especially if they kept telling us how dangerous the machine is.

No, the parent is exactly right. I've seen it countless times and I am so sick of it. The poor, poor CEO has to be evil, it is his duty.

Depends on where you put the perfect play ceiling. I think each side has good points in their respective favor. There have been strong pushes by both humans and computers in improving their best play in the past few years.

A 2 stone handicap, however, does not scale linearly with strength. It becomes relatively more impactful at higher levels. For pro players, 2 stones are gigantic, and for beginner players, they make zero difference. Same for a point advantage (komi adjustment). So there might come a point where it is physically impossible for a computer to beat a top human under some handicap.

I'm not sure if I'm allowed to name the source on this here, but someone very familiar with the top Go program scene explained that there is a fair chance that a perfect game has been played already. This is based on the probability of a mistake per move in relation to the number of games there were played by top programs. Hard to believe at first, but perchance it is true. The problem is, of course, that we don't know which games are perfect.

If I remember the numbers correctly, your setup seems to be wrong if you only get 1.4k e/s with 4x 3090. What network did you use?

I don't buy novideo trash, go ask the people running the benchmarks

AlphaGo is a bit difficult to compare because their parallelism efficiency was abysmal. You might as well consider it a regular 8x or so GPU machine.

The tree search in KataGo does not use Monte Carlo simulations at all. It is purely policy/value network based, and works insanely well indeed.

I've not looked at the specific game in question, but in general, doubling the thinking time leads to a very notable strength improvement regardless of the base level of play. The increase becomes slightly smaller at higher levels but does not really diminish, and it currently looks like the ceiling is still a bit away.

If it is "only" 4x3090 at 16s, you will definitely get a drastic playing strength boost from doubling the thinking time. This is still clearly within the interval of a linear relationship between thinking time and playing strength, i.e. elo ~ log time. The relationship, to my knowledge, becomes less clear only starting at about 10-20x the number of playouts.

Source: Wrote a paper on this. https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/10645535

In Go, we had an extensive documentary on this, based on the strange case of a man possessed by the spirit of an ancient master Go player. I'm not going to spoil the results here; it's an enjoyable series and includes many small introductory tutorials to the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hikaru_no_Go

His chain of thought has a length not beyond his nose. It's typical for dementia, and I have to see it all the time with my parent. Only the very last sentence is kept in mind, all other context is mostly gone.

I wish a reporter would ask him what question he heard and answered, because I'm sure he would be unable to correctly answer.