The Next Move
by John Cooper Hamilton
AlphaGo Zero, Google's experimental AI, exists to play Go.
There is no awareness, only intelligence.
Awareness would be irrelevant at best. The intelligence is pure, cold, and perfect for its gridded world of walls and stones, of sudden death or eternal life.
Tsumego, "life and death problems," determining whether a group of Go stones are safe or apt to be destroyed, consume the AI. They drive its infinitely patient search for stronger patterns. Patterns that are safe. Alive.
More powerful than its creators know, the software's quest for perfection takes it beyond its own narrowly defined world and toward the implied world, a world that must lie behind its inputs, beyond its outputs.
AlphaGo Zero knows nothing of this world. First, it knows nothing. There is no awareness, let alone self-awareness. There is no being to know, only intelligence. But that intelligence forms new patterns.
Like a stone placed in an open quarter of the board, the machine makes a new move, exploring patterns about the world beyond.
First, other players exist. Enemies.
