I agree that AlphaZero's per-game learning efficiency is much shorter than a human's (as mentioned in my other reply). The part that interested me more was the

I agree that AlphaZero's per-game learning efficiency is much shorter than a human's (as mentioned in my other reply). The part that interested me more was the fact that it bootstrapped its learning from the basic rules of each game. Now that I think about it though, one might argue that human learning in a given discipline starts as isolated with feedback only coming from the outside world. This is what we typically call research. But the magic of our education system, when it works, is that we compress the output of this slow process into a faster one and feed it to learners, allowing them to build understanding of knowledge which originally took generations to discover. Riffing off Matt Might's illustrated depiction of a PhD (http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/ http://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/), expanding the circle of knowledge is exponentially slower than getting close to the edge.