Acquisition of chess knowledge in AlphaZero
Sounds like when you teach a neural network chess, it ends up learning many of the same concepts that we do.To me, this is a great illustration that superhuman intelligence is not magic. When a superhuman AI plays chess, the moves usually make sense to an expert. And even if they don't immediately make sense, they usually make sense once the expert plays out some lines to see what happens. Superhuman AIs have crushed humans at chess not by discovering new, wildly counterintuitive openings that dumb humans missed (it actually plays many of the same openings). Rather, it just does what humans do - win pieces, keep your king safe, attack, gain space, restrict your opponent's moves - but better and more consistently.This paper builds on that concept and finds that not only are a superhuman AI's moves usually understandable by experts, but even some of the superhuman AI's internal representations are understandable by experts (!).In the 5th century BCE, Greek philosophers thought the Earth was a sphere. Although they were eventually improved upon by Newton's ellipsoid, they still had arrived at the right concept. And here I think we see the same thing: although a superhuman AI 'understands' chess better than human experts, its understanding still builds upon the same concepts.Thinking broadly, like, suppose we invent some superhuman AGI for $100B in 2100. And then we ask it how to optimize our paperclip production. I don't think its recommendations will be magic. Paperclip production is a fairly well understood problem: you bring in some metal, you reshape it, you send it out. It's probably gonna have much of the same advice we've already figured out: invest in good equipment, take advantage of economies of scale, choose cheap but effective metals, put factories near sources of energy and labor and raw materials, ship out paperclips in a hierarchical network with caches along the way to supply unanticipated demand, etc. Like, an AGI's suggestions may well be better than a management consultant's, but it's not like it's going to wave a magic wand and flip the laws of physics. Rather, I expect it to win within the same frameworks we've developed, but by doing things better and more consistently than humans.