The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI

by Ray Kurzweil

When IBM beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov with Deep Blue in 1997, the supercomputer was filled with all the know-how its programmers could gather from human chess experts.[80] It was not useful for anything else; it was a chess-playing machine. By contrast, AlphaGo Zero was not given any human information about Go except for the rules of the game, and after about three days of playing against itself, it evolved from making random moves to easily defeating its previous human-trained incarnation, AlphaGo, by 100 games to 0.[81] (In 2016, AlphaGo had beaten Lee Sedol, who at the time ranked second in international Go titles, in four out of five games.) AlphaGo Zero used a new form of reinforcement learning in which the program became its own instructor. It took AlphaGo Zero just twenty-one days to reach the level of AlphaGo Master, the version that defeated sixty top professionals online and the world champion Ke Jie in three out of three games in 2017.[82] After forty days, AlphaGo Zero surpassed all other versions of AlphaGo and became the best Go player in human or computer form.[83] It achieved this with no encoded knowledge of human play and no human intervention.