Seems like somewhere in-between. They created a novel approach that is scalable and improves as you throw more hardware at it. And Google is throwing a lot of hardware at it based on their past matches with hundreds of CPUs and GPUs. I think the fact that they have been so mum about what hardware they're using suggests it's quite extreme, but hopefully they release more details soon.
Its somewhat interesting to think about the differences in marketing between IBM and Google; IBM was marketing hardware and HPC with deep blue, but Google is marketing AI when so much of their advances in AlphaGo are enabled by distributed systems and HPC running billions of games training deep neural networks. It feels a little smoke and mirrors which is probably why they won't release much until after they get enough marketing value from this tournament :)
Its somewhat interesting to think about the differences in marketing between IBM and Google; IBM was marketing hardware and HPC with deep blue, but Google is marketing AI when so much of their advances in AlphaGo are enabled by distributed systems and HPC running billions of games training deep neural networks. It feels a little smoke and mirrors which is probably why they won't release much until after they get enough marketing value from this tournament :)