> question for someone who has time to read the paper: can you train it to master chess and go at the same time? or is it one or the other? I'm assuming the latter.
I'm sure you could with a multi-headed NN. But what would be the point? There's very little transfer of knowledge between the games, especially once you get past the very most basics.
The point is that real problem domains are not neatly partitioned and labeled.
I don't know what kind of input the NN itself gets, but computer vision is enough to translate a photo of a chessboard to a usable symbolic representation. But it would be nice to already have a black box-ish computer program that figures out what's the game at hand and how to play it.
The next variation is have the adversary start playing a chess variant and have the machine recognize it (assuming honesty) and play it to significant skill. Then "real life Pong" where the size and aerodynamics of the ball are unknown to it. This is the gist of human intelligence: answering questions is significantly easier than figuring out what the question is.
I'm sure you could with a multi-headed NN. But what would be the point? There's very little transfer of knowledge between the games, especially once you get past the very most basics.