General Purpose AI
A while back, I wrote about Google’s AI program called AlphaGo that beat the world human champion in a 5 match series. The same company then created another AI program that was not shown any games of Go masters to “learn” from. In fact, it was shown no games at all! It was only fed the rules of the game, that’s all. And it had 4 specialized processors unlike the 48 of AlphaGo. The speed at which the new AI learnt Go was scorching. Within 3 days (yes, days), it was better than the AI that beat the human world champion! Within 3 weeks , it could 60 of the world’s top players, including the updated version of AlphaGo! Beating 60 top players is impressive because usually, such programs are custom designed for one particular player and his style. Then they trained the AI’s guns on chess. Why chess, you wonder. Isn’t that old news in the man v/s machine saga? Didn’t Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov decades back? What’s left to prove on the chess front? Aha, unlike Deep Blue, the...