The Guardian view on bridging human and machine learning: it’s all in the game | Editorial

A French startup may have cracked AI's problem of trust with software that can learn better than humans - and express that learning

Last week an artificial intelligence - called NooK - beat eight world champion players at bridge. That algorithms can outwit humans might not seem newsworthy. IBM's Deep Blue beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. In 2016, Google's AlphaGo defeated a Go grandmaster. A year later the AI Libratus saw off four poker stars. Yet the real-world applications of such technologies have been limited. Stephen Muggleton, a computer scientist, suggests this is because they are black boxes" that can learn better than people but cannot express, and communicate, that learning.

NooK, from French startup NukkAI, is different. It won by formulating rules, not just brute-force calculation. Bridge is not the same as chess or Go, which are two-player games based on an entirely known set of facts. Bridge is a game for four players split into two teams, involving collaboration and competition with incomplete information. Each player sees only their cards and needs to gather information about the other players' hands. Unlike poker, which also involves hidden information and bluffing, in bridge a player must disclose to their opponents the information they are passing to their partner.