The result, according to DeepMind, is that AlphaZero took an вЂњarguably more human-like approachвЂќ to the search for moves, processing around 80,000 positions per second in chess compared to Stockfish 8вЂ™s 70m.ДЄfter winning 25 games of chess versus Stockfish 8 starting as white, with first-mover advantage, a further three starting with black and drawing a further 72 games, AlphaZero also learned shogi in two hours before beating the leading program Elmo in a 100-game matchup. The rest it works out by playing itself over and over with self-reinforced knowledge. Photograph: Stan Honda/AFP/Getty ImagesДeepMind said the difference between AlphaZero and its competitors is that its machine-learning approach is given no human input apart from the basic rules of chess. Д¬hess enthusiasts watch World Chess champion Garry Kasparov on a television monitor in 1997. вЂњWe have always assumed that chess required too much empirical knowledge for a machine to play so well from scratch, with no human knowledge added at all.вЂќД¬omputer programs have been able to beat the best human chess players ever since IBMвЂ™s Deep Blue supercomputer defeated Kasparov on. вЂњItвЂ™s a remarkable achievement, even if we should have expected it after AlphaGo,вЂќ former world chess champion Garry Kasparov told.

вЂњStarting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case,вЂќ said the paperвЂ™s authors that include DeepMind founder Demis Hassabis, who was a child chess prodigy reaching master standard at the age of 13. AlphaZero won or drew all 100 games, according to a non-peer-reviewed research paper published with Cornell University LibraryвЂ™s arXiv.

Kasparov chess machine