DeepMind published AlphaGo ZERO this week, and the result reorganized my priors more than the original (#078) did. The first AlphaGo learned from 30 million human expert moves, then surpassed us. Zero learned from NOTHING — the rules, a board, and self-play. Three days: it beat the version that beat Lee Sedol, 100 games to 0. Forty days: it beat every AlphaGo ever built. Along the way it REDISCOVERED centuries of human joseki (opening theory), used them for a while, and then DISCARDED some in favor of moves we’d never found in three thousand years. Human knowledge, it turns out, wasn’t the ladder — it was scaffolding, and load-bearing bias. The bitter arithmetic: our accumulated expertise was worth about three days of self-play. I’ve retold Move 37 (#078) as “the machine surprised us”; Zero’s lesson is stranger — WE were the constraint being optimized away. Centaurs-over-engines (#078) needs an asterisk I don’t have words for yet. Ask me again in ten years, again.
Also this fortnight: KRACK broke WPA2 — the WiFi encryption EVERYONE uses, vulnerable to key-reinstallation attacks; patch everything with an antenna (the eternal sermon gains a wireless verse). And the F1 title fight is heading to Mexico next weekend: Hamilton vs Vettel, two juggernauts, the fourth championship guaranteed to one of them within a fortnight.
TIL: self-play as curriculum — the system generates opponents exactly at its own level, forever, the perfect training partner no human league can provide. Synthetic data eating the world starts here. Bookmark this one hard.