What AlphaGo Can Teach Us About How People Learn

David Silver is responsible for several eye-catching demonstrations of artificial intelligence in recent years, working on advances that helped revive interest in the field after the last great AI Winter. At DeepMind, a subsidiary of Alphabet, Silver has led the development of techniques that let computers learn for themselves how to solve problems that once seemed intractable. Most famously, this includes AlphaGo, a program revealed in 2017 that taught itself to play the ancient board game Go to a grandmaster level. Go is too subtle and instinctive to be tamed using conventional programming, but AlphaGo learned to play through practice and positive reward--an AI technique known as "reinforcement learning." In 2018, Silver and colleagues developed a more general version of the program, called AlphaZero, capable of learning to play expert chess and shogi as well as Go.