Google AI Achieves "Alien" Superhuman Mastery of Chess and Go in Mere Hours - The New Stack

News of a specialized computer program beating human champions at games like chess and Go might not surprise people as much as it might have before, as it did when Deep Blue beat world chess champ Garry Kasparov back in 1997, or even more recently when Google DeepMind's AI AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol in a stunning upset back in 2016. But the goal for AI researchers has always been to develop an artificial general intelligence (AGI) that's capable at not only merely mastering games, but also learning and solving all kinds of things in a general way, as humans do. And it seems that Google's subsidiary DeepMind has once again gotten one step closer to this goal with AlphaZero, their latest AI development. Their recently published pre-print research outlined how AlphaZero succeeded in handily beating one of the world's top chess engines -- after teaching itself and mastering the game in four hours and reaching a "superhuman" level of play in a mere 24 hours in not only chess but in two other different types of board games. The most remarkable thing about this latest evolution is that in contrast to finely hand-tuned game-playing programs, the only input AlphaZero had were the basic rules of the game.