A glimpse of an awesome new kind of intelligence
One Giant Step for a Chess-Playing Machine In this quote, Stockfish is a devastatingly effective, but traditional, chess-playing program that easily beats humans: Most unnerving was that AlphaZero seemed to express insight. It played like no computer ever has, intuitively and beautifully, with a romantic, attacking style. It played gambits and took risks. In some games it paralyzed Stockfish and toyed with it. ... Grandmasters had never seen anything like it. AlphaZero had the finesse of a virtuoso and the power of a machine. It was humankind’s first glimpse of an awesome new kind of intelligence. Coincidentally, this article also dovetails with Homo Deus by Yuval Harari, which I mentioned in my last post. We are used to thinking of consciousness and intelligence as inseparable, because in humans, they do go together. Though there's now lots of evidence that machines can be intelligent, there is no evidence as yet that they are conscious. Lacking that, it's meaningless to talk...