In four hours, Google’s chess robot proves to be superhuman

HUNDREDS of years of chess knowledge was learnt and then surpassed by Google Deepmind’s artificial intelligence algorithm in just four hours, it emerged yesterday.

The programme, Alphazero, quickly mastered the game, before coming up with new strategies, which are now being analysed by grandmasters.

When Deep Blue, the IBM supercomputer, beat Gary Kasparov in 1997, it was because it had been programmed with the best moves. Alphazero has only been afforded the rules of chess and must work out how to win simply from playing against itself.

Simon Williams, an English grandmaster, said that the achievement was “one for the history books”.

“On the Dec 6 2017, Alphazero took over the chess world,” he said, before joking: “Alphazero and Deepmind then went on to dominate chess, eventually solving the game and finally enslaving the human race as pets.”

David Kramaley, who runs Chessable, a chess education site, said: “The games Alphazero played show it can calculate some incredibly creative positional bombs, the depth of which are far beyond anything humans or chess computers have come up with.

The Deepmind team eventually want to use the algorithm to solve health problems. They believe it could come up with cures for major illness in days or weeks, which would have taken humans hundreds of years to find.

The latest achievement was published online on the site arxiv.