University of Huddersfield - University of the Year 2013

Professor of Artificial Intelligence Wolfgang Faber comments on Google announcing that its AlphaGo Zero artificial intelligence program has triumphed at chess against world-leading specialist software within hours of teaching itself the game from scratch and considers where humans will start losing their jobs to intelligent computers and machines. "'Google's'superhuman' DeepMind AI claims chess crown' has been a headline on the BBC recently. What does it mean, and are our jobs, or even our lives in danger? First, let us have a look at what caused this headline: A few days ago, a manuscript by a group around David Silver, Thomas Hubert, and Julian Schrittwieser of London-based, Google (or rather Alphabet)-owned DeepMind was uploaded to arXiv, in which the system AlphaZero is described and very impressive results in learning how to play three traditional board games (chess, shogi, Go) well are reported. The setup allowed for learning very successful (superhuman) strategies in a few ...