By: Sean Ingle
December 11, 2018
Garry Kasparov is not only humanity’s greatest ever chess player but its highest-profile victim of artificial intelligence. His loss to IBM’s super computer Deep Blue in 1997 made global headlines and left him feeling bitter and, well, blue. Yet there is a warm glint in his eye when he talks about AlphaZero, the game-changing chess program that took just four hours to teach itself to become the strongest in history.
“For me, as a very sharp and attacking player, it is a pleasure watching AlphaZero play,” he said after playing in a charity tournament for Chess in Schools before the London Chess Classic, which runs until Monday. “We all expect machines to play very solid and slow games but AlphaZero just does the opposite. It is surprising to see a machine playing so aggressively, and it also shows a lot of creativity. It is a real breakthrough – and I believe it could be extremely helpful for many other studies in the field of computer science.”