You're right, though the distinction with the parent poster is that AlphaGo Zero had no input knowledge to learn from, unlike humans (who read books, listen to other players' wisdom, etc). It's a fairly well known phenomenon that e.g. current era chess players are far stronger than previous eras' players, and this probably has to do with the accumulation of knowledge over decades, or even hundreds of years. It's incredibly impressive for software to replicate that knowledge base so quickly.

Not so much from the accumulation of knowledge because players can only study so many games. The difference is largely because their are more people today, they have more free time, and they could play vs high level opponents sooner.

Remember people reach peak play in ~15 years, but they don't nessisarily keep up with advances.

PS: You see this across a huge range of fields from running, figure skating, to music people simply spend more time and resources getting better.

But software is starting from the same base. To claim it isn't would be to claim that the computers programmed themselves completely (which is simply not true).

Sure, there is some base there, and a fair bit of programming existed in the structure of the implementation. However, the heuristics themselves were not, and this is very significant. The software managed to reproduce and beat the previous best (both human and the previous iteration of itself), completely by playing against itself.

So, in this sense, it's kind of like taking a human, teaching them the exact rules of the game and showing them how to run calculations, and then telling them to sit in a room playing games against themselves. In my experience from chess, you'd be at a huge disadvantage if you started with this zero-knowledge handicap.

> In my experience from chess, you'd be at a huge disadvantage if you started with this zero-knowledge handicap.

One problem is that we can't play millions of games against ourselves in a few hours. We can play a few games, grow tired, and then need to go do something else. Come back the next day, repeat. It's a very slow process, and we have to worry about other things in life. How much of one's time and focus can be used on learning a game? You could spend 12 hours a day, if you had no other responsibilities, I guess. That might be counter productive, though. We just don't have the same capacity.

If you artificially limited AlphaGo to human capacity, then my money would be on the human being a superior player.

All software starts with a base of 4 billion years of evolution and thousands years of social progress and so on. But Alpha Zero doesn't require a knowledge of Go on top of that.