AlphaGo Zero Goes From Rank Beginner to Grandmaster in Three Days--Without Any Help

In the 1970 sci-fi thriller Colossus: The Forbin Project, a computer designed to control the United States' nuclear weapons is switched on, and immediately discovers the existence of a Soviet counterpart. The two machines have become one, and it has mankind by the throat. Development work takes a lot longer than that. Today DeepMind, a London-based subsidiary of Google, announced that it has developed a machine that plays the ancient Chinese game of Go much better than its predecessor, AlphaGo, which last year beat Lee Sedol, a world-class player, in Seoul. The earlier program was trained for months on a massive database of master games and got plenty of pointers--training wheels, as it were--from its human creators.