Google's DeepMind AI Becomes a Superhuman Chess Player In a Few Hours (theverge.com)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: In a new paper published this week, DeepMind describes how a descendant of the AI program that first conquered the board game Go has taught itself to play a number of other games at a superhuman level. After eight hours of self-play, the program bested the AI that first beat the human world Go champion; and after four hours of training, it beat the current world champion chess-playing program, Stockfish. Then for a victory lap, it trained for just two hours and polished off one of the world's best shogi-playing programs named Elmo (shogi being a Japanese version of chess that's played on a bigger board). One of the key advances here is that the new AI program, named AlphaZero, wasn't specifically designed to play any of these games. In each case, it was given some basic rules (like how knights move in chess, and so on) but was programmed with no other strategies or tactics. It simply got better by playing itself over and over again at an accelerated pace -- a method of training AI known as "reinforcement learning."

Comments

Re:Super Human?

[Baron_Yam]

>, were actions that may not create a net positive or negative are used over when the net outcome is positive.

Which is still a net improvement over humans, who may stick with actions that are actually net negative despite proof if they initially miscategorized them as positive.

What they should get the AI to do to minimize such artifacts is have a meta-analysis going where the positive associations are re-evaluated whenever the overall victory is judged to not be at stake in the event the action was correctly evaluated in the first place.

And next:

[forkfail]

The world's gonna be an... interesting... place once someone merges this sort of code with virus code.

Because we understand progress

[fyngyrz]

Why would you expect 99% unemployment? This AI will never be able to: [optimism redacted]

No, not this one. Not even the next one. The one after that? Or after that?

Eventually, they will. The question is simply how long will that be. Right now, the ML pace continues to accelerate. Soon, they'll be stacking one skill upon another. The skill to walk. The skill to understand plumbing joints and leaks. The skill to know home construction. Etc.

It's coming. That whole "will never be able to" business... that's not going to pan out for anyone.