谷歌DeepMind:人工智能更加智能了

导读:继阿尔法狗火遍全球后，谷歌DeepMind再创新技术发明阿尔法元。

Google’s DeepMind says it has made another big advance in artificial intelligence by getting a machine to master the Chinese game of Go without help from human players.

The AlphaGo program, devised by the tech giant’s AI division, has already beaten two of the world’s best players.

It had started by learning from thousands of games played by humans.

But the new AlphaGo Zero began with a blank Go board and no data apart from the rules, and then played itself.

Within 72 hours it was good enough to beat the original program by 100 games to zero.

DeepMind’s chief executive, Demis Hassabis, said the system could now have more general applications in scientific research.

"We’re quite excited because we think this is now good enough to make some real progress on some real problems even though we’re obviously a long way from full AI," he told the BBC and other journalists.

The London-based artificial intelligence company’s software defeated South Korean Go player Lee Se-dol by four games to one last year.

AlphaGo followed this with the defeat of the world’s number one Go player, China’s Ke Jie, in May.

David Silver, who led that effort, says the team took a very different approach with AlphaGo Zero.

"The new version starts from a neural network that knows nothing at all about the game of Go," he explained.

"The only knowledge it has is the rules of the game. Apart from that, it figures everything out just by playing games against itself."

What is Go?

Go is thought to date back to ancient China, several thousand years ago.

Using black and white stones on a grid, players gain the upper hand by surrounding their opponents’ pieces with their own.

The rules are simpler than those of chess, but a player typically has a choice of 200 moves at most points in the game, compared with about 20 in chess.

It can be very difficult to determine who is winning, and many of the top human players rely on instinct.

Whereas AlphaGo took months to get to the point where it could take on a professional, AlphaGo Zero got there in just three days, using a fraction of the processing power.

"It shows it’s the novel algorithms that count, not the compute power or the data," says Mr Silver.

He enthuses about an idea some may find rather scary - that in just a few days a machine has surpassed the knowledge of this game acquired by humanity over thousands of years.

"We’ve actually removed the constraints of human knowledge and it’s able, therefore, to create knowledge itself from first principles, from a blank slate," he said.

Many of the team have now moved on to new projects where they are trying to take this technique to new areas. Demis Hassabis mentions drug design and the discovery of new materials as areas of interest.

Whereas some see a threat from AI, he looks ahead with optimism.

"I hope these kind of algorithms will be routinely working with us as scientific experts medical experts on advancing the frontiers of science and medicine - that’s what I hope," he says.

We need to keep a close eye on the ethical dilemmas involved in developing a machine.

But for now, there are few signs that AlphaGo Zero will steal our jobs or threaten to make humanity obsolete.

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