Google reports in the current issue of the journal Nature that it has a new greatly improved Go program called "AlphaGo Zero" that is now the most powerful GO program in the world. And the program isn't good because of brute force, it needs to make less than one tenth as many calculations as the previous best GO program "AlphaGo" that defeated the world's top human GO player in 2015 4 games out of 5; and yet AlphaGo Zero just defeated AlphaGo in a 100 game tournament 100 games to zero.
Even more interesting is how AlphaGo Zero got so smart. The older program AlphaGo had to start by analyzing hundreds of thousands of championship level games made by human players, but AlphaGo Zero started with nothing but the simple rules of GO and instructions to learn to get better. At first the program was terrible but day by day it got better and after 40 days of thinking about the problem became the best at it in the world. But of course after 40 days of constant self modification no human being can say how AlphaGo Zero works. https://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v550/n7676/full/nature24270.html It seems to me the next logical step would be to switch the program's interest from getting better at the game of GO to improving computer code, including its own. I wonder where that could lead. John K Clark -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to everything-list+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To post to this group, send email to everything-list@googlegroups.com. Visit this group at https://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
