Everything Is F*cked

The Final Religion
In  1997,  Deep  Blue,  a  supercomputer  developed  by  IBM,  beat  Garry
Kasparov,  the  world’s  best  chess  player.  It  was  a  watershed  moment  in  the
history of computing, a seismic event that shook many people’s understanding
of  technology,  intelligence,  and  humanity.  But  today,  it  is  but  a  quaint
memory: of course a computer would beat the world champion at chess. Why
wouldn’t it?
Since the beginning of computing, chess has been a favorite means to test
artificial intelligence.
1
That’s because chess possesses a near-infinite number
of permutations: there are more possible chess games than there are atoms in
the observable universe. In any board position, if one looks only three or four
moves ahead, there are already hundreds of millions of variations.
For a computer to match a human player, not only must it be capable of
calculating an incredible number of possible outcomes, but it must also have
solid algorithms to help it decide what’s worth calculating. Put another way:
to  beat  a  human  player,  a  computer’s  Thinking  Brain,  despite  being  vastly
superior  to  a  human’s,  must  be  programmed  to  evaluate  more/less  valuable
board  positions—that  is,  the  computer  must  have  a  modestly  powerful
“Feeling Brain” programmed into it.
2
Since that day in 1997, computers have continued to improve at chess at a
staggering  rate.  Over  the  following  fifteen  years,  the  top  human  players
regularly  got  pummeled  by  chess  software,  sometimes  by  embarrassing
margins.
3
Today, it’s not even close. Kasparov himself recently joked that the
chess  app  that  comes  installed  on  most  smartphones  “is  far  more  powerful
than  Deep  Blue  was.”
4
 These  days,  chess  software  developers  hold
tournaments  for  their  programs  to  see  whose  algorithms  come  out  on  top.
Humans are not only excluded from these tournaments, but they’d likely not
even place high enough for it to matter anyway.
The  undisputed  champion  of  the  chess  software  world  for  the  past  few
years has been an open-source program called Stockfish. Stockfish has either
won  or  been  the  runner-up  in  almost  every  significant  chess  software
tournament  since  2014.  A  collaboration  between  half  a  dozen  lifelong  chess

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software  developers,  Stockfish  today  represents  the  pinnacle  of  chess  logic.
Not  only  is  it  a  chess  engine,  but  it  can  analyze  any  game,  any  position,
giving  grandmaster-level  feedback  within  seconds  of  each  move  a  player
makes.
Stockfish  was  happily  going  along  being  the  king  of  the  computerized
chess mountain, being the gold standard of all chess analysis worldwide, until
2018, when Google showed up to the party.
Then shit got weird.
Google  has  a  program  called  AlphaZero.  It’s  not  chess  software.  It’s
artificial  intelligence  (AI)  software.  Instead  of  being  programmed  to  play
chess  or  another  game,  the  software  is  programmed  to  learn—and  not  just
chess, but any game.
Early in 2018, Stockfish faced off against Google’s AlphaZero. On paper,
it  was  not  even  close  to  a  fair  fight.  AlphaZero  can  calculate  “only”  eighty
thousand board positions per second. Stockfish? Seventy million. In terms of
computational  power,  that’s  like  me  entering  a  footrace  against  a  Formula
One race car.
But  it  gets  even  weirder:  the  day  of  the  match,  AlphaZero  didn’t  even
know  how  to  play  chess.  Yes,  that’s  right—before  its  match  with  the  best
chess  software  in  the  world,  AlphaZero  had  less  than  a  day  to  learn  chess
from scratch. The software spent most of the day running simulations of chess
games against itself, learning as it went. It developed strategies and principles
the same way a human would: through trial and error.
Imagine  the  scenario.  You’ve  just  learned  the  rules  of  chess,  one  of  the
most  complex  games  on  the  planet.  You’re  given  less  than  a  day  to  mess
around with a board and figure out some strategies. And from there, your first
game ever will be against the world champion.
Good luck.
Yet,  somehow,  AlphaZero  won.  Okay,  it  didn’t  just  win.  AlphaZero
smashed Stockfish. Out of one hundred games, AlphaZero won or drew every