Can machine learning teach us anything? - [Opinion]

The Breathless headline caught my eye: "Computer Shows Human Intuition-AI Breakthrough!" (or words to that effect). I was intrigued but skeptical. Reading further, I learned that a computer program, AlphaZero, developed by a team at DeepMind, in London, had beaten other champion chess-playing programs, as well as (of course) humans. That wasn't the interesting news, as we take that kind of dominance for granted these days. What fascinated me was how the program had been constructed. Instead of being tuned by expert players, AlphaZero initially knew nothing more than the rules of chess. It learned how to play, and to win, by playing against itself. Soon it got so good it could beat everyone and everything. • But, I wondered, isn't this what humans have been doing for centuries-learning by playing chess against ourselves? What, if anything, has the computer learned so quickly that we haven't in all those years? Unfortunately, the neural network isn't telling us. It appears, for instance, that it sacrifices pieces to gain position at a greater frequency than humans would usually attempt. Whatever, I am still intrigued, but also still skeptical reading headlines about the software showing human intuition, which is defined as "immediate apprehension or cognition without reasoning." Is AlphaZero evoking human intuition, or is this superhuman intuition? Or should it not be called intuition at all? • Similar claims are being made about a new poker-playing program from a team at the University of Alberta, in Canada, called DeepStack, which has trounced human opponents in Texas hold'em. The researchers write that it "plays using ‘intuition’ honed through deep learning to reassess its strategy with each decision." To me, having little poker experience, this was a revelation: Contrary to my naive belief that winning at poker was based on psyching out opponents, poker is really a game of strategy. And the computer has learned a better strategy than we have discovered on our own.