Yes, AlphaZero was a nice innovation in training methods, employing iterated distillation and amplification. Of course a game is the perfect application for it

Yes, AlphaZero was a nice innovation in training methods, employing iterated distillation and amplification. Of course a game is the perfect application for it because you get the fitness function built in: just play the game. There does seem to be some research into applying the same methods to alignment problems, which is interesting. Unfortunately Google's naming scheme is kind of confusing. AlphaGo is the go engine that has some human knowledge built in. Then supposedly AlphaZero is the generalised thing that can be trained on go or chess or shogi etc. But AlphaZero trained on chess is also referred to as just AlphaZero? Whereas AlphaZero trained on Go is called AlphaZero Go... I should have been clearer on which I meant I guess, my response to your sibling should clear up what I meant though.