24 August 2019 | New Scientist | 39by the ability of DeepMind’s AIs to make
winning moves no human player would
dream up, rewriting centuries-old playbooks.
Tapping into these AIs can take players to a
new level. After losing to AlphaGo, European
Go champion Fan Hui trained against the
AI and boosted his global ranking from 600
to 300 in just a few months.
Computers have been far better than people
at chess for decades. For most players, that
was true even before Kasparov’s historic loss
to Deep Blue hammered the point home.All professional players now practice with
chess computers. These tend to play defensive
games, so the style of top players has become
more defensive too.
A further development of DeepMind’s game-
playing AIs, AlphaZero, has shaken up the
chess world again. In a series of games in 2017
and 2018, AlphaZero beat Stockfish, one of the
best chess computers in the world. Unlike
Stockfish, AlphaZero plays an aggressive game,
often sacrificing pieces early on if this helps it
achieve its goals. “AlphaZero just goes for the
attack straight away,” says Natasha Regan, who
has represented the UK at both Go and chess.
Regan and grandmaster Matthew
Sadler have co-authored a book called
Game Changer, which explores AlphaZero’s
groundbreaking chess strategies and offers
advice for would-be challengers. The AI is
more like a maverick human player than
a typical chess computer, they say, which
makes it a more fascinating tutor.
Creative aggression may be a common
trait. Good StarCraft players usually build
defences in the early stage of a game. But
Regan and Sadler noticed that AlphaStar
didn’t bother. They recognised some of the >“ Tapping into world-
beating AIs can take
human players to
a new level”