Google creates AI that can teach itself and 'isn't constrained by the limits of human knowledge'

Sign up to our free weekly IndyTech newsletter delivered straight to your inbox Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter Sign up to our free IndyTech newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. The company’s AI division, DeepMind, has unveiled AlphaGo Zero, an extremely advanced system that managed to accumulate thousands of years of human knowledge within days. “AlphaGo Zero skips this step and learns to play simply by playing games against itself, starting from completely random play.” Go has been played by humans for thousands of years, yet within a matter of days, a computer program was able to learn the game from scratch and become, quite possibly, the greatest player of the game the world has ever seen. As a result, a long-standing ambition of AI research is to bypass this step, creating algorithms that achieve superhuman performance in the most challenging domains with no human input.” AlphaGo Zero is seen as a significant step towards that goal, and its creators are confident that they’ll be able to use similar techniques to tackle major real-world problems in the future. “By not using human data — by not using human expertise in any fashion – we’ve actually removed the constraints of human knowledge,” said AlphaGo Zero’s lead programmer, David Silver, reports to the Verge.