Steven Strogatz revisits his 2018 AlphaZero essay: how do his AI predictions hold up in 2026?
stevenstrogatz · x · 2026-09-27
Mathematician Steven Strogatz resurfaces his 2018 New York Times essay on AlphaZero and asks readers how well its predictions have aged by 2026.
- The essay centered on DeepMind's AlphaZero, a deep reinforcement learning algorithm that mastered chess, shogi and Go from rules alone via millions of self-play games, becoming the strongest player in hours.
- The results were peer-reviewed in Science, addressing earlier criticisms about the fairness of its matches against Stockfish.
- The piece speculated the same ML-driven revolution would sweep through math and science, questioning how long the human era of insight would last.
Widely seen as an early, prescient take on deep learning's impact on scientific discovery, the thread reopens debate on AI's role in research.
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