The artificial intelligence program AlphaZero has reached a “turning point” in history after displaying creativity and intuition similar to that of a human being, the Telegraph reports.
AlphaZero, which was developed by Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind Technologies in the U.K., has created a new style of chess play that indicates the program is improvising in a similar way to a human. DeepMind programed AlphaZero with only the basic rules of chess, and it learned by playing itself in millions of games, learning from both its successes and failures, known as reinforced learning.
AlphaZero chooses moves going by a “nebulous sense that it is all going to work out in the long run,” instead of running millions of calculations to find the best possible outcome like most advanced chess computers.
When AlphaZero played 1,000 games with the open-source chess engine Stockfish, it won 155 and lost only six, while drawing the rest. AlphaZero also displayed an unusual readiness to sacrifice pieces, which chess computers typically avoid doing.
“Instead of processing human instructions and knowledge at tremendous speed, as all previous chess machines, AlphaZero generates its own knowledge,” said former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov. “It plays with a very dynamic style, much like my own. The implications go far beyond my beloved chessboard."
“It’s got a very subtle sense of intuition which helps it balance out all the different factors,” said Prof. David Silver, the leader of DeepMind’s reinforcement learning research group.
“My personal belief is that we’ve seen something of turning point where we’re starting to understand that many abilities, like intuition and creativity, that we previously thought were in the domain only of the human mind, are actually accessible to machine intelligence as well. And I think that’s a really exciting moment in history.”
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