Google’s new super AI can now self-train without human input

Google’s AlphaGo AI already dominated all human players in the Chinese board game of “Go”. Now, it’s done with humans altogether. DeepMind, the Alphabet subsidiary behind the artificial intelligence, just announced AlphaGo Zero.

Whereas the older AlphaGo trained in Go from thousands of human amateur and professional games, Zero foregoes the need for human insight altogether, and learns to play simply by playing games against itself, starting from completely random play. In doing so, it quickly surpassed human level of play and defeated the previously published champion-defeating version of AlphaGo by 100 games to 0.

Human intelligence as a disturbing factor

Removing the “constraints of human knowledge” has been the most liberating factor, according to the company’s CEO Demis Hassabis. Over the course of millions of AlphaGo vs AlphaGo games, the system progressively learned the game of Go from scratch, accumulating thousands of years of human knowledge during a period of just a few days.

AlphaGo Zero also discovered new knowledge, developing unconventional strategies and creative new moves that echoed and surpassed the novel techniques it played in the games against Lee Sedol and Ke Jie, two professional human players.

While it is still early days, AlphaGo Zero constitutes a critical step towards this goal. If similar techniques can be applied to other structured problems, such as protein folding, reducing energy consumption or searching for revolutionary new materials, the resulting breakthroughs have the potential to positively impact society.