" But artificial intelligence has moved on since then.7 One of the vogue ideas is called temporal difference learning. When designers created TD-Gammon, a program to play backgammon, they did not provide it with any preprogrammed chess knowledge or capacity to conduct deep searches. Instead, it made moves, predicted what would happen next, and then looked at how far its expectations were wide of the mark. That enabled it to update its expectations, which it took into the next game. In effect, TD-Gammon was a trial-and-error program. It was left to play day and night against itself, developing practical knowledge. When it was let loose on human opponents, it defeated the best in the world. The software that enabled it to learn from error was sophisticated, but its main strength was that it didn’t need to sleep, so could practice all the time. "

― Matthew Syed , Black Box Thinking: Why Some People Never Learn from Their Mistakes - But Some Do