Is running AlphaGo really that expensive? I get that training deep learning systems is very computationally expensive, but my understanding is that running them is orders of magnitude cheaper.
The Economist says "The version playing against Mr Lee uses 1,920 standard processor chips and 280 special ones developed originally to produce graphics for video games"
If you price by the GCE calculator[0] it's $1920 to rent 1920 CPU cores for 20 hours. This doesn't include GPU costs as they don't seem to have GPUs available on cloud, but I could see that easily doubling the costs.
It would be nice if they preserve a snap shot of Alphago as it was a the start of the Sedol games as a historic thing. Then if they open source it people could go play it too. They have mostly open sourced their code but not I think the learning data.
edit: table showing gains as CPUs are added - https://i.imgur.com/xxdWUtV.png