DeepMind, the same outfit that built AlphaGo, the AI platform that learned Go through supervised study of the game and went on to famously beat the top ranked player Lee Sedol has built an algorithm that now plays chess.
What is even more incredible about this new “AlphaZero” AI is that it learned how to play chess through unsupervised learning. Instead of teaching it chess by feeding in key games and tactics, the designers just taught it the rules and let the algorithm figure out the best moves all on its own, by playing itself.
Because it no longer needed to wade through and analyze historical data and also because it developed it’s own approach which was ruthlessly efficient. When AlphaZero was applied to Go, it surpassed AlphaGo within 3 days. AlphaZero was beating the strongest chess computer programs within 24 hours.
instead of a hybrid brute-force approach, which has been the core of chess engines today, it went in a completely different direction, opting for an extremely selective search that emulates how humans think.
Chess News writes about the development after reading a scientific paper published about the research accomplishment.
Chess News goes on to write about the broader impact of this breakthrough and what this means for the future of a generalized AI that can learn on its own.
So where does this leave chess, and what does it mean in general? This is a game-changer, a term that is so often used and abused, and there is no other way of describing it. Deep Blue was a breakthrough moment, but its result was thanks to highly specialized hardware whose purpose was to play chess, nothing else. If one had tried to make it play Go, for example, it would have never worked. This completely open-ended AI able to learn from the least amount of information and take this to levels hitherto never imagined is not a threat to ‘beat’ us at any number of activities, it is a promise to analyze problems such as disease, famine, and other problems in ways that might conceivably lead to genuine solutions.
Meanwhile, researchers at the University of Rochester have figured out a way to inject information into a monkey’s brain.
Leave a comment