A self-taught computer has become the world’s best player of Go, the fiendishly complex board game, without any input from human experts.
DeepMind, Google’s artificial intelligence subsidiary in London, announced the milestone in AI less than two years after the highly publicised unveiling of AlphaGo, the first machine to beat human champions at the ancient Asian game. Details are published in the scientific journal Nature.
Previous versions of AlphaGo learned initially by analysing thousands of games between excellent human players to discover winning moves. The new development, called AlphaGo Zero, dispenses with this human expertise and starts just by knowing the rules and objective of the game.