I am wondering how much the amount of hardware they used had an effect on the bottom line, compared to the wisdom of their algorithm. Everybody knows it's a great step in AI. But how much? How much their algorithm is smart? Or simply put did they overfit by throwing a lot of layers and GPUs to the task? Or the algorithm is truly smart? What is the ratio of that.
It is the same question for the data they used. Facebook, Google and others seem to agree that, at the end, the quantity and quality of data are more important than the algorithm itself. So how much is it at play here? Knowing that will be able to show us why it is performing well and how much we can appreciate their work.
Basically, the ("lots of hardware") distributed implementation gets ~3100 points in the Elo rating against ~2900. ~2900 is still sufficient to win against Fan Hui. So I would say, that yes, this algorithm has most of the merit here.
It is the same question for the data they used. Facebook, Google and others seem to agree that, at the end, the quantity and quality of data are more important than the algorithm itself. So how much is it at play here? Knowing that will be able to show us why it is performing well and how much we can appreciate their work.