AlphaGo upgrade proving 'even smarter'

PARIS - The computer that stunned humanity by beating the best mortal players at a strategy board game requiring "intuition" has become even smarter, its makers said on Wednesday.

Even more startling, the updated version of AlphaGo is entirely self-taught - a major step toward the rise of machines that achieve superhuman abilities "with no human input", they reported in the science journal Nature.

Dubbed AlphaGo Zero, the artificial intelligence system learned by itself, within days, to master the ancient Chinese board game known as "Go".

It came up with its own, novel moves to eclipse all the Go acumen humans have acquired over thousands of years.

After just three days of self-training it was put to the test against AlphaGo, its forerunner, which previously dethroned the top human champs.

AlphaGo Zero won by 100 games to zero.

"AlphaGo Zero not only rediscovered the common patterns and openings that humans tend to play ... it ultimately discarded them in preference for its own variants which humans don't even know about or play at the moment," said AlphaGo lead researcher David Silver.

AlphaGo made world headlines with its shock 4-1 victory in March 2016 over 18-time Go champion Lee Se-dol, one of the game's all-time masters.

Lee's defeat showed that AI was progressing faster than widely thought, said experts at the time, who called for rules to make sure powerful AI always remains completely under human control.

Unlike its predecessors which trained on data from thousands of human games before practicing by playing against itself, AlphaGo Zero did not learn from humans, or by playing against them, according to researchers at DeepMind, the British AI company developing the system.

Starting with just the rules of Go and no instructions, the system learned the game, devised strategy and improved as it competed against itself.

AlphaGo Zero's ability to learn on its own "might appear creepily autonomous", said Anders Sandberg of the Future of Humanity Institute at Oxford University, but it was worth noting that AlphaGo was not programming itself.

"The clever insights making Zero better was due to humans, not any piece of software suggesting that this approach would be good. I would start to get worried when that happens."

Agence France-presse

(China Daily 10/20/2017 page10)