They didn't learn with nothing. They learned with a game of Go to play. If they'd never "seen" the game of Go there's no way they could have learned to play it.
Data can be either static in the form of examples or dynamic in the form of an interactive game or world. Humans primarily learn through dynamic interaction with the world in our early years, then switch to learning more from static information as we enter schools and the work place.
One open question is how far you can go in terms of evolving intelligence with games and self-play or adversarial play. There's a whole subject area around this in evolutionary game theory.
That's what I mean by gathering information through dynamic interaction. It's not explicitly given the rules, but it can infer them. Interacting with an external system and sampling the result is still a way of gathering training data.
In fact this is ultimately how we've gathered almost all the information we have. If it's in our cultural knowledge store it means someone observed or experienced it. Humans are very good at learning by sampling reality and then later systematizing that knowledge and communicating it to other humans with language. It's basically what makes us "intelligent."
A brain in a vat can't learn anything beyond recombinations of what it already knows.
The fundamental limit on the growth of intelligence is the sum total of all information that can be statically input or dynamically sampled in its environment and what can be inferred from that information. Once you exhaust that you're a brain in a vat.
Data can be either static in the form of examples or dynamic in the form of an interactive game or world. Humans primarily learn through dynamic interaction with the world in our early years, then switch to learning more from static information as we enter schools and the work place.
One open question is how far you can go in terms of evolving intelligence with games and self-play or adversarial play. There's a whole subject area around this in evolutionary game theory.