[taneq]

I don't think they mean the two in the same way. AlphaZero is "general purpose artificial intelligence" because if you formulate a problem in the right way and then throw a server cluster at it for a few weeks, it often comes back with pretty good performance at solving that problem. It's probably our current best crack at creating AGI, but it's a long way from a machine that can take a very high level goal and figure out the rest for itself, which is what we usually mean by "AGI" - not just a machine that answers multiple questions, but a thing analogous to a human mind which can analyse new things, infer properties and mechanics, generalise those to new contexts, and apply that knowledge to achieve new outcomes.

[mindgam3]

“if you formulate a [very specific type of problem involving perfect information games] in the right way”

[taneq]

Hey, at least it's a type of problem rather than a problem itself.

I haven't studied enough myself yet to know the answer to this one, but what are the differences between AlphaZero and the OpenAI 5 DOTA team's approach? Would it be possible to apply AlphaZero to DOTA?

[sanxiyn]

DOTA is partially observable, so I believe AlphaZero can't be applied, as-is.

[mindgam3]

Agreed. Poker is another interesting case of "partial information" game. There is some discussion of this in the links below. I suspect that AlphaZero could make a decent poker player with a non-trivial amount of tweaking.

1. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601157/could-alphago-bluf...

2. https://www.quantamagazine.org/why-alphazeros-artificial-int...

[why_only_15]

I wonder what would happen if you made DOTA totally observable. You could probably reformat it as 5 pieces for a player instead of 5 people on a team or the like. It would probably change the game too much to be recognizable as the same, but I think it would be an interesting experiment if nothing else.