It's a common refrain that while computing has conquered Chess, it has failed miserably (to date) with Go. The article is suggesting this is changing, valaraucal is disputing the premise of the article, that's all.
Whereas the best chess engine is better than the best human, the best go engine can only beat a weak player with a big handicap. That's all valaraucal was trying to say.
I'm a chess expert but not a go expert - I don't know if valaraucal's right - but I suspect he is overstating both the weakness of the player and the size of the handicap.
Worrying about cores etc is overthinking it, they don't make that much difference (it's not a linear problem). Houdini is much stronger (or at least has a much higher rating) than Magnus Carlsen, even on a commodity laptop.
Incidentally, if you build a chess engine from scratch, it will take a bit of effort to get an engine that can beat a 2100 player with a 2 bishop handicap. I am about 2000, I spent a couple of weeks building a toy engine (available on triplehappy.com, my website). It is rated about 1500, but it will still beat me if I don't pay attention to the tactics. Illustrative of the fact that human ratings and machine ratings are not directly comparable. To get that far I had to give it some chess knowledge and some tactical ability. When you first get a chess engine playing legal chess it is going to be lamentably weak (less than 1000).
I think I was too focused on the specifics of the analogy to realize it was a general statement. Thank you for clearing that up for me.
I did not mean to delete the comment you replied to. I have included it below:
It is terribly confusing analogy for me. Initially I thought the computer engine analogy was what was intended. But then I started thinking about someone rated 2100, down two bishops playing stockfish on a decent box with 3-4-5 EGTBs and a two bishop advantage. That seemed like a no brainer so I moved on to crafty, and then GNU chess and then what? I realized that I could not think of an engine that would consider a win with two bishops an accomplishment. As far as "maybe 2600 is a better target" goes you have to go all the way down to #88 on the CCRL in order to get to 2600.[^1] That is with even material and definitely not using 64 cores (the CCRL uses a AMD X2 4600+ at 2.4GHz benchmark).
I am sorry but thinking about a chess engine running on 64 cores with a two bishop advantage against a 2100 rated human is not reasonable. If I knew nothing about computers and Go I could reasonably read the 2-bishops/2100-ELO analogy and conclude that CrazyStone was laughable. I do not know much about computers and Go but I do know enough that I do not consider CrazyStone's performance laughable.
