Checkmate Humanity
Will robots one day destroy us? It’s a question that increasingly preoccupies many of our most brilliant scientists and tech entrepreneurs.
For developments in artificial intelligence (AI) — machines programmed to perform tasks that normally require human intelligence — are poised to reshape our workplace and leisure time dramatically.
This year, a leading Oxford academic, Professor Michael Wooldridge, warned MPs that AI could go ‘rogue’, that machines might become so complex that the engineers who create them will no longer understand them or be able to predict how they function.
Yes, it’s a concern, but a ‘historic’ new development makes unpredictable decisions by AI machines the least of our worries. And it all started with a game of chess.
AlphaZero, an AI computer program, this month proved itself to be the world’s greatest ever chess champion, thrashing a previous title-holder, another AI system called Stockfish 8, in a 100-game marathon.
So far, so nerdy, and possibly something only chess devotees or computer geeks might get excited about.
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But what’s so frighteningly clever about AlphaZero is that it taught itself chess in just four hours. It was simply given the rules and — crucially — instructed to learn how to win by playing against itself.
In doing so, it assimilated hundreds of years of chess knowledge and tactics — but then went on to surpass all previous human invention in the game.
In those 240 minutes of practice, the program not only taught itself how to play but developed tactics that are unbeatably innovative — and revealed its startling ability to trounce human intelligence. Some of its winning moves had never been recorded in the 1,500 years that human brains have pitted wits across the chequered board.
Employing your King as an attacking piece? Unprecedented. But AlphaZero wielded it with merciless self-taught logic.
Garry Kasparov, the grandmaster who was famously defeated by IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue in 1997 when it was pre-programmed with the best moves, said: ‘The ability of a machine to surpass centuries of human knowledge . . . is a world-changing tool.’
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