Remember Deepmind's AlphaGo? It represented a fundamental breakthrough in AI development, because it was one of the first game-playing AIs that took no human instruction and read no rules.

Instead, it used a technique called self-play reinforcement learning (RL) to build up its own understanding of the game. Pure trial and Error across millions, even billions of virtual games, starting out more or less randomly pulling whatever levers were available, and attempting to learn from the results.