..."A new paper published in Nature today describes how the artificially intelligent system that defeated Go grandmaster Lee Sedol in 2016 got its digital ass kicked by a new-and-improved version of itself. And it didn’t just lose by a little—it couldn’t even muster a single win after playing a hundred games. Incredibly, it took AlphaGo Zero (AGZ) just three days to train itself from scratch and acquire literally thousands of years of human Go knowledge simply by playing itself. The only input it had was what it does to the positions of the black and white pieces on the board. In addition to devising completely new strategies, the new system is also considerably leaner and meaner than the original AlphaGo."...
..."First of all, the original AlphaGo had the benefit of learning from literally thousands of previously played Go games, including those played by human amateurs and professionals. AGZ, on the other hand, received no help from its human handlers, and had access to absolutely nothing aside from the rules of the game. Using “reinforcement learning,” AGZ played itself over and over again, “starting from random play, and without any supervision or use of human data,” according to the Google-owned DeepMind researchers in their study. This allowed the system to improve and refine its digital brain, known as a neural network, as it continually learned from experience. This basically means that AlphaGo Zero was its own teacher.
“This technique is more powerful than previous versions of AlphaGo because it is no longer constrained by the limits of human knowledge,” notes the DeepMind team in a release. “Instead, it is able to learn tabula rasa [from a clean slate] from the strongest player in the world: AlphaGo itself.”"...
https://gizmodo.com/stunning-ai-breakthrough-takes-us-one-step-closer-to-th-1819650084
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