Google’s AI, DeepMind MuZero, has achieved another milestone, it can learn to beat video games without knowing the rules.
Artificial intelligence has no limits, as all the news that appear almost every day show us. Today Google announces that its artificial intelligence DeepMind MuZero is capable of winning several games without knowing its rules.
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MuZero: Google’s new AI is able to learn rules itself and beat games
Beyond the anecdote, the announcement has great importance because it shows that the current artificial intelligence is already able to look beyond and anticipate the future.
DeepMind has already beaten the best world champions of gaming on video games like Starcraft II. But in all these cases, it knew the rules. The new Google AI, MuZero, learns the rules on its own.
MuZero uses a new learning technique called future-oriented search. What it does is to study a series of moves according to the move of the opposing player. In complex games like chess, there can be millions of combinations.
By analyzing the opponent’s moves MuZero learns what is allowed and what is not. In the beginning, MuZero loses almost every game, but then it learns the rules of the game on its own and becomes a master. It was able to beat professional chess players, break records in Pacman.
Wendy Hall, a computer science professor at the University of Southampton and a member of the UK’s AI Council, says that “The results of DeepMind’s work are quite astounding and I marvel at what they are going to be able to achieve in the future given the resources they have available to them” but also warns: “My worry is that whilst constantly striving to improve the performance of their algorithms and apply the results for the benefit of society, the teams at DeepMind are not putting as much effort into thinking through potential unintended consequences of their work.”
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