These early programs’ chief advantage against human opponents was not originality but superior processing power, enabling them to evaluate far more options in a given period of time. By contrast, AlphaZero had no preprogrammed moves, combinations, or strategies derived from human play. AlphaZero’s style was entirely the product of AI training: creators supplied it with the rules of chess, instructing it to develop a strategy to maximize its proportion of wins to losses. After training for just four hours by playing against itself, AlphaZero emerged as the world’s most effective chess program.
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