by the Economist
The result is a program that is not just superhuman, but crushingly so. Skill at Go (and chess, and many other games) can be quantified with something called an Elo rating, which gives the probability, based on past performance, that one player will beat another. After 40 days of training AlphaGo Zero had an Elo rating of more than 5,000—putting it as far ahead of Mr Ke as Mr Ke is of a keen amateur, and suggesting that it is, in practice, impossible for Mr Ke, or any other human being, ever to defeat it. Advances in AI often trigger worries about human obsolescence. DeepMind hopes such machines will end up as assistants to biological brains, rather than replacements for them, in the way that other technologies from search engines to paper have done. Watching a machine invent new ways to tackle a problem can, after all, help push people down new and productive paths. One of the benefits of AlphaGo, says Mr Silver, is that, in a game full of history and tradition, it has encouraged human players to question the old wisdom, and to experiment.
https://www.economist.com/news/science-and-technology/21730391-learning-play-go-only-start-latest-ai-can-work-things-out-without
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