system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
ELI5: How does Googles new AI work?
gpt
It is called machine learning and is quite complex.

What it boils down to is that you break a problem into discreet parts, or steps.

You show the machine all the different steps it can do. Then you tell the machine what the desired "win" condition is.

It goes and compares all the different steps and series of steps to figure out the best way of getting to the win condition. 

As these models get better and more generic, we can let the win condition be more vague and it has more freedom to learn how to get there. 

It is entirely dependent upon structures called neural networks, which have an input layer, a hidden layer, and an output layer. The hidden layer is trained to give outputs to certain inputs. 

For a board game training data might be all the moves of a bunch of games, and which player won. We don't actually know what the algorithm inside came up with, because we didn't tell it what to do. 

It learned how to get to the "win" state by analyzing a bunch of data and coming up with its own pattern recognition to apply to new games.