milestone in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Google’s AlphaZero program defeats Stockfish 8, the world chess champion since 2016, at chess. Stockfish 8 had access to the brute force of centuries of human experience accumulated in its memory. It was capable of calculating 70 billion positions per second. In contrast, AlphaZero can only calculate 80,000 positions per second, and no one has ever taught it any chess strategy whatsoever. It learned using the principles of AI machine learning, playing against itself. It took only 4 hours to learn. It played 100 games with Stockfish 8 and won 28 times, drawing 78 times. It didn’t lose a single game. Many of its moves are completely unconventional and can be considered creative.
