The world's smartest game-playing AI--DeepMind's AlphaGo--just got way smarter

AlphaGo wasn't the best Go player on the planet for very long. A new version of the masterful AI program has emerged, and it's a monster. In a head-to-head matchup, AlphaGo Zero defeated the original program by 100 games to none. What's really cool is how AlphaGo Zero did it. Whereas the original AlphaGo learned by ingesting data from hundreds of thousands of games played by human experts, AlphaGo Zero, also developed by the Alphabet subsidiary DeepMind, started with nothing but a blank board and the rules of the game.