[cromwellian]

To me, these arguments are vaguely reminiscent of the philosophical arguments from the 80s and 90s. I also remember some people using Go as an example of a problem to which ML approaches won't work. We've gone from people giving up on computers solving Go, to human Go masters retiring because AlphaGo is impossible to beat.

I mean, AlphaZero is trained solely on self-play. It is not even given the rules of the game, it exists in the world where it is rewarded or punished by the 'laws of physics' of the Go board the way we exist in a environment with physical rules that constrain and reward or punish our biology.

To say that AlphaZero is just data compression of the inputs seems hand wavy. It is data compression only in the sense that phenomena from the world is stream of data, and humans developing representations of that data (eg laws of physics) around that data are a compression of it.

But AlphaZero wasn't given a huge feed of pre-played world data. Rather, it interacted with, and poked around in a simulated environment, until it was able to make good predictions on how its interactions would turn out. I learn that dropping a ball falls to the ground, and so I can make a prediction of what happens if I drop a ball. How is AlphaZero predicting the outcome of moves purely from self-play just another kNN? If so, why isn't our brain's learning just a kNN then?