A team of researchers from Aarhus University in Denmark let DeepMind‘s AlphaZero algorithm loose on a few quantum computing optimization problems and, much to everyone’s surprise, the AI was able to solve the problems without any outside expert knowledge. Not bad for a machine learning paradigm designed to win at games like Chess and StarCraft.
You’ve probably heard of DeepMind and its AI systems. The UK-based Google sister-company is responsible for both AlphaZero and AlphaGo, the systems that beat the world’s most skilled humans at the games of Chess and Go. In essence, what both systems do is try to figure out what the optimal next set of moves is. Where humans can only think so many “moves” ahead, the AI can look a bit further using optimized search and planning methods.
