But it looks like AlphaGo is searching fewer positions per second than Giraffe did.
AlphaZero evaluates 80K positions per second, according to this paper, and the Giraffe paper says that Giraffe averaged 258570 evaluations per second when running STS.
While we can't directly compare the computer power, this implies that AZ has learned a better representation.
Giraffe was trained until convergence. Maybe if there was more compute power then, a different model would have been used, but that's deep into the world of silly hypotheticals.
AlphaZero evaluates 80K positions per second, according to this paper, and the Giraffe paper says that Giraffe averaged 258570 evaluations per second when running STS.
While we can't directly compare the computer power, this implies that AZ has learned a better representation.