*Why? Maybe because it's uncontaminated by any human ideas of how to play Go.
*You've got to feel kinda sorry for the original AlphaGo, which is much better than anybody human but sure didn't last long as world champion.
https://slim-weight.info/story/this-more-powerful-version-of-alphago-learns-on-its-own%3C/p%3E%3Cdiv class="AdWrapper-efOWgS khQFma ad ad--in-content">
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Despite its historic win for machines last year, the original version of AlphaGo stood on the shoulders of many, uncredited, humans. The software “learned” about Go by ingesting data from 160,000 amateur games taken from an online Go community. After that initial boost, AlphaGo honed itself to be superhuman by playing millions more games against itself.
AlphaGo Zero is so-named because it doesn’t need human knowledge to get started, relying solely on that self-play mechanism. The software initially makes moves at random. But it is programmed to know when it has won or lost a game, and to adjust its play to favor moves that lead to victories. A paper published in the journal Nature Thursday describes how 29 million games of self-play made AlphaGo Zero into the most powerful Go player on the planet.
“We’ve removed the constraint of human knowledge,” said David Silver, a leading researcher on the project....
