Was AlphaGo Zero a Coin Flip for David Silver?

David Silver says he was about 50-50 on whether removing human priors would produce even smarter intelligence. He likes research questions that sit on a knife edge. Work where he is already 95% certain of the answer feels boring, because good research asks something he is really not sure about in advance.

He was not confident, and seeing the result was exciting. Silver says they are making a bet: go further by giving up the priors everyone else relies on today, the human data and the whole internet of knowledge other systems are built on. The choice is a short-term sacrifice. They give up a certain amount of performance to reach something potentially far greater.

For Silver, a super learner needs full depth and full breadth. In the depth direction, it has to discover things so far beyond human knowledge that they sit beyond the prior. Leaning harder on human data leaves them less able to find the algorithms that discover a whole new field of knowledge. In the breadth direction, the algorithms have to be placed into environments where language and the human data they started with are just not a good fit.