Remember AlphaGo, the first artificial intelligence to defeat a grandmaster at Go? Well, the program just got a major upgrade, and it can now teach itself how to dominate the game without any human intervention. But get this: In a tournament that pitted AI against AI, this juiced-up version, called AlphaGo Zero, defeated the regular AlphaGo by a whopping 100 games to 0, signifying a major advance in the field. Hear that? It’s the technological singularity inching ever closer.
A new paper published in Nature today describes how the artificially intelligent system that defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol in 2016 got its digital ass kicked by a new-and-improved version of itself. And it didn’t just lose by a little—it couldn’t even muster a single win after playing a hundred games. Incredibly, it took AlphaGo Zero (AGZ) just three days to train itself from scratch and acquire literally thousands of years of human Go knowledge simply by playing itself. The only input it had was what it does to the positions of the black and white pieces on the board. In addition to devising completely new strategies, the new system is also considerably leaner and meaner than the original AlphaGo.
Now, every once in a while the field of AI experiences a “holy shit” moment, and this would appear to be one of those moments. Looking back, other “holy shit” moments include Deep Blue defeating Garry Kasparov at chess in 1997, IBM’s Watson defeating two of the world’s best Jeopardy! champions in 2011, the aforementioned defeat of Lee Sedol in 2016, and most recently, the defeat of four professional no-limit Texas hold’em poker players at the hands of Libratus, an AI developed by computer scientists at Carnegie Mellon University.
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