DeepMind's newest AI learns by itself and creates its own knowledge

A couple of month's ago Google's Artificial Intelligence (AI) group, DeepMind, unveiled the latest incarnation of its Go playing program, AlphaGo Zero, an AI so powerful that it managed to cram thousands of years of human knowledge of playing the game, before inventing better moves of its own, into just three days. Hailed as a major breakthrough in AI learning because, unlike previous versions of AlphaGo, which went on to beat the world Go champion as well as take the Go online player community to the cleaners, AlphaGo Zero mastered the ancient Chinese board game from nothing more than a clean slate, with no more help from humans than being told the rules of the game. However, and as if that wasn't already impressive enough, it took its predecessor, AlphaGo, the AI that famously beat Lee Sedol, the South Korean grandmaster, to the cleaners as well, hammering it 100 games to nil. AlphaGo Zero's ability to learn for itself, and without human input, is a milestone on the road to one day realising Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), something that the same company, DeepMind, published an architecture for last year, and it will undoubtedly help us create the next generation of more "general" AI's that can do a lot more than just thrash humans at board games. AlphaGo Zero amassed its impressive skills using a technique called Reinforcement Learning, and at the heart of the program are a group of software "neurons" that are connected together to form a digital neural network.