Alpha Zero’s “Alien” Chess Shows the Power, and the Peculiarity, of AI

The latest AI program developed by DeepMind is not only brilliant and remarkably flexible—it’s also quite weird. DeepMind published a paper this week describing a game-playing program it developed that proved capable of mastering chess and the Japanese game Shoju, having already mastered the game of Go. Demis Hassabis, the founder and CEO of DeepMind and an expert chess player himself, presented further details of the system, called Alpha Zero, at an AI conference in California on Thursday. The program often made moves that would seem unthinkable to a human chess player.

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