Computers beat a human in chess after 50 years of facing research and technological uphill. But just as we thought that computers will go on to annihilate humans at chess, the latest artificial intelligence (AI) is dialling it down - to appreciate how humans play and make blunders. 

Maia, the AI chess programme employs a groundbreaking AI that has bested superhuman chess-playing. However, this programme focuses on predicting moves by human players, including the mistakes they would make. 

Cornell University professor Jon Kleinberg is the lead creator of Maia stated that this programme is the first step towards AI understanding human fallibility. Hopefully, this programme will eventually get better at interacting with humans, even teaching, assisting them or even negotiating with them. For example, in the healthcare sector, a system can anticipate errors by trained doctors while reading medical scans and images. “One way to do this is to take problems in which human doctors form diagnoses based on medical images, and to look for images on which the system predicts a high level of disagreement among them,” said Kleinberg.

Maia is developed by adapting Leela Zero's code which is an open-source clone of Alpha Zero, an AI programme that was the first to play chess by learning to play it independently. Alpha Zero was created by DeepMind, an Alphabet subsidiary. Alpha Zero has been trained on various datasets to make consequently winning moves through reinforcement learning. 

However, Leela Zero's code, which is the heart of Maia, was modified to learn to make accurate predictions of what might be the next human move. Maia was trained on LiChess dataset, a popular online chess server, resulting into a chess program that plays chess like humans. Maia's expertise levels can also be fixed as per needs. This makes Maia a valuable chess sparring partner for all ages. The programme can also be trained to mimic a particular chess player, by training it on sufficient dataset that would help chess champions and aspirants learn from their nemesis or their hero!

Beyond just games, AI predicting human behviours can help companies anticipate and overcome negotiation tactics.