You see what I’m getting at here? It understood nothing! Sure, you can explain the rules to a human and they’d be able to start learning how to play, but the real learning is learning the hand eye coordination to get the ball to do anything you want.

Ok, but that another thing and still it is not to master the game.

I really doubt that the "AI" know nothing at the beginning, it can not know the rules but it needed to know what goal should be else, why the goal could not be to put the ball in the furthest hole from your starting position ? Or in every hole ? Or to go to every possible position that is not a hole ? For all what the "AI" know, these could be more rewarding ends, don't you think ?

Ha! It’s clear you’ve never played this game.

I am from a generation where this were the only games... aside trying to die out in the trees trying to do stupid things with the friends... I think I still should have one in the attic...

Even if you could get your first win in 6 hours, you wouldn’t then be able to repeat the win every time thereafter.

Just because I, like every other human, have not the precise control and microseconds reflex of a computer. Give this AI the same level of imperfect control and reaction times of a human and it will be the same. First win in six hours and no guarantee that the folliwing one would be faster.

How are you not impressed?

Maybe because my first exam back at the university was to write a program that play Go against a human in Pascal (damn, how the hell I was able to pass that exam...) and the secod one was to write a program to colour a graphs so that two connected nodes were not of the same color in Assembler (Mips) in the same time the AI used to "beat" the game, starting from scrath.

I mean, it is a nice result but if, as it seems, you give the AI a different board and the AI is not able to beat it at the first try, then you simply used a neural network to brute force a problem in a game where the whole idea is to have a precise control of the board you are using.