This is a linkpost for https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/07/alphazero-google-deepmind-ai-beats-champion-program-teaching-itself-to-play-four-hours
We previously had a link to the actual scientfic article. The Guardian article contains no useful additional information and leaves out the fact that Stockfish 8 was severly handicapped by giving it only 1 GB Ram and no access to opening and lategame libraries. The published Elo number for the AlphaGoZero chess program was 3000 while the published Elo numbers for Stockfish 8 is 3600.
It's interesting that AlphaGoZero did as well as it did but it's misleading to say it's better than Stockfish 8.
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/dec/07/alphazero-google-deepmind-ai-beats-champion-program-teaching-itself-to-play-four-hours
https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.01815
I'm posting this slightly late; the paper is from December 5.
I'd be interested to learn if AlphaZero could be applied to other closed-environment tasks, such as designing hardware in a simulator.