Bound by different limits than us, and gifted with different talents, these electronic minds were given the freedom to interact with things on their own terms, play to their own cognitive strengths, and build their own ground-up understanding of what works and what doesn't.

AlphaZero doesn't know chess like Magnus Carlssen does. It's never heard of the Queen's Gambit or studied the great grandmasters. It's just played a shit-ton of chess, and built up its own understanding against the cold, hard logic of wins and losses, in an inhuman and inscrutable language it created itself as it went.