As impressive as all these feats were, game-playing AI typically exploit the properties of a single game and often rely on hand-crafted knowledge coded into them by developers. But DeepMind’s latest creation, AlphaZero, detailed in a new paper in Science, was built from the bottom up to be game-agnostic.
All it was given was the rules of each game, and it then played itself thousands of times, effectively using trial and error to work out the best tactics for each game. It was then pitted against the most powerful specialized AI for each game, including its predecessor AlphaGo, beating them comprehensively.
“This work has, in effect, closed a multi-decade chapter in AI researchers need to look to a new generation of games to provide the next set of challenges, ”IBM computer scientist Murray Campbell, who has worked on chess-playing computers, wrote in an opinion for Science.
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