Google's New AI Is a Master of Games, but How Does It Compare to the Human Mind?

For humans, chess may take a lifetime to master. But Google DeepMind's new artificial intelligence program, AlphaZero, can teach itself to conquer the board in a matter of hours. Building on its past success with the AlphaGo suite--a series of computer programs designed to play the Chinese board game Go--Google boasts that its new AlphaZero achieves a level of "superhuman performance" at not just one board game, but three: Go, chess, and shogi (essentially, Japanese chess). The team of computer scientists and engineers, led by Google's David Silver, reported its findings recently in the journal Science. "Before this, with machine learning, you could get a machine to do exactly what you want--but only that thing," says Ayanna Howard, an expert in interactive computing and artificial intelligence at the Georgia Institute of Technology who did not participate in the research.