
AI Teaches Itself Chess in 72 Hours, Plays at International Master Level - abhimir
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/541276/deep-learning-machine-teaches-itself-chess-in-72-hours-plays-at-international-master/
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Jun8
Well, it didn't really teach _itself_ , it was carefully designed and was fed
a huge (155M games generated from 5M actual games) data set. Coupled with an
semi-supervised approach (rate each position whether the AI playing itself
wins or loses). Similar approach yielded strong AIs for go, too
([http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3409](http://arxiv.org/abs/1412.3409)), yet
nowhere near the IM level for chess.

One comment in the article that stuck to me was (and this is central to AI
discussions) :

"While Deep Blue was searching some 200 million positions per second, Kasparov
was probably searching no more than five a second. And yet he played at
essentially the same level. Clearly, humans have a trick up their sleeve that
computers have yet to master."

Deep Blue didn't have anything to master, if he can beat the world champion
that was it! A rough analogy would be: A bird can fly by flapping its wings 5
times a second while a Cessna 172's propeller has to make 200 revolutions per
minute (numbers made up), so we still have some avian tricks to master. They
are two different approaches to a problem!

At the time, Deep Blue required a 32-node IBM RS/6000 SP high-performance
computer
([https://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/meet/html/d.3.shtml](https://www.research.ibm.com/deepblue/meet/html/d.3.shtml))
for its power, now a regular MBP can run an instance of Stockfish that would
give a GM a good run for its money.

Now, if you can design an AI that can learn a comparably simpler board game,
say, Settlers of Catan together with a human (not fed millions of games) and
can play with reasonable strategy, _that_ would be a teaching itself how to
play.

