A new AI has just defeated the best chess computer in the world. Google’s new technologies are on the rise.
Google is currently pouring a lot of resources into the development of artificial intelligences and computer systems that can self-improve. After a week ago there was a human-surpassing improvement of an AI, the new AI “AlphaZero” has now also achieved a small masterpiece, albeit in a completely different field.
In the realm of chess computers, there was an undefeated world champion, the AI Stockfish. This was regarded by chess professionals as the ultimate – at least until Google set its AI AlphaZero against it. The AI had only four hours to learn how to play chess. At the beginning, it only knew how a valid move looks and what the goal of the game is.
In the duel between the two AIs, a total of 100 games were played. 72 matches ended in a draw. 28 games were won by Google’s AlphaZero, which thus emerges as the clear winner.
However, there are also some critics on chess.com, as Stockfish was unable to compete with its full computational capacity and did not have the complete set of opening moves to choose from. Yet even the critics agree that AlphaZero would likely have won anyway, though not by such a large margin.
While chess is fundamentally a relatively simple game with only a few rules and a fixed number of possible options, the speed at which AlphaZero has learned is alarming. It will likely just be a matter of time before these AIs are also capable of mastering computer games like StarCraft 2 or similar strategy games.
