“The important thing to highlight here is that it’s a controlled, self-contained, artificial environment where what everything means, and what the outcome of every action is, is crystal clear,” he says. Michael Rovatsos at the University of Edinburgh, UK, who wasn’t involved in the research, says that while impressive, there is still a very long way to go before an AI can be thought of as generally intelligent, because games are settings in which all rules and behaviours are clearly defined, unlike the real world. “So there was some some set of ideas coming from AlphaZero, and some set of ideas coming from DeepStack into this big big mix of ideas, which is Student of Games.” “When you’re in a game like poker, it’s so much harder to figure out how the hell am I going to search if I don’t know what cards the opponent holds?” says Schmid. DeepMind hired the whole DeepStack team with the aim of building a model that could generalise across both types of game, which led to the creation of SoG.ĭeepMind AI can beat the best weather forecasts - but there is a catch The two require fundamentally different approaches. The difference between those two models is that one focused on imperfect-knowledge games – those where players don’t know the state of all other players, such as their hands in poker – and one focused on perfect-knowledge games like chess, where both players can see the position of all pieces at all times. The other was DeepMind’s AlphaZero, which has beaten the best human players at games like chess and Go. One was DeepStack, the AI created by a team including Schmid at the University of Alberta in Canada and which was the first to beat human professional players at poker. Martin Schmid, who worked at DeepMind on the AI but who is now at a start-up called EquiLibre Technologies, says that the Student of Games (SoG) model can trace its lineage back to two projects. The AI, called Student of Games, was created by Google DeepMind, which says it is a step towards an artificial general intelligence capable of carrying out any task with superhuman performance.

A single artificial intelligence can beat human players in chess, Go, poker and other games that require a variety of strategies to win.

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