Coming up with new solutions that humans might miss

Sarah Knapton reports at the Telegraph,

DeepMind’s artificial intelligence programme AlphaZero is now showing signs of human-like intuition and creativity, in what developers have hailed as ‘turning point’ in history.

The computer system amazed the world last year when it mastered the game of chess from scratch within just four hours, despite not being programmed how to win.

But now, after a year of testing and analysis by chess grandmasters, the machine has developed a new style of play unlike anything ever seen before, suggesting the programme is now improvising like a human.

Unlike the world’s best chess machine - Stockfish - which calculates millions of possible outcomes as it plays, AlphaZero learns from its past successes and failures, making its moves based on, a ‘nebulous sense that it is all going to work out in the long run,’ according to experts at DeepMind.

...DeepMind team are now hoping to use their system to help solve real world problems, such as why proteins become misfolded in diseases such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s.

The new results suggest that it could come up with new solutions that humans might miss or take far longer to discover.

DeepMind CEO and co-founder Demis Hassabis said: “The reason that tabula rasa was important is because we want this to be as general as possible. The more general it is across the games the more likely it will be able to transfer to real world problems. Like protein folding.

“Protein folding has always been our number one target. I’ve had that in mind for a long time, because its a huge problem in biology and it will unlock a lot of other things like drug discovery.

Read more of this fascinating article here.