[nkurz]

And to suggest a computer Go player, taught in a few days, is a "marginal improvement" over decades of "AI research": as my kids say, "wut?"

Maybe I'm the one that has it backward, but I'm pretty sure that Harford would not agree with the statement that Alpha Go Zero is only a "marginal improvement".

To the contrary, he says that Alpha Go is an "outlier", and uses it as an example of the sort of "speculative research" we should be doing more of: "Productivity and technological progress are lacklustre because the research behind AlphaGo Zero is not typical of the way we try to produce new ideas."

Apparently he should have been clearer, but I took the article as a call for more real research of the type that produced Alpha Go, and fewer of the "pragmatic shortcuts" and "brute-force approaches that taught us little but played strong chess"

[mannykannot]

There seems to be a mismatch between the headline and the article itself. I see this quite often, and I think it is often due to headlines being written by editors, or even editorial assistants.

The author's choice of examples, featuring a counter-example prominently, seems odd - perhaps it is to capitalize on the interest in AlphaGo Zero. The article is something of an anachronism, in that it would have worked better immediately after Deep Blue (or even after Watson/Jeopardy).