It has zero to do with A.I. It's just an interactive database. I have a very old Facebook friend who works for the company that designed this and I was just talking to him about it ten minutes ago. When I heard about it I was able to guess how it worked in about five seconds and he said I was right. That's cos I'm intelligent and this thing just compares patterns very fast.
The supercomputer is using a neural network to find patterns.
Actually, this is a bit misleading if you mean some sort of pre-specified patterns. Rather, AlphaZero uses neural networks to produce two numbers: one is the evaluation of the position and the other is the probability that a move is best. Most other applications of neural networks involve them being used to identify specified patterns.
Artificial Intelligence is probably a word thrown around a little too much, maybe better is machine learning. Its "learning" through pattern-recognition, much like a self-driving car. Its definitely a step towards an A.I. with diverse learning capabilities. Most modern A.I. are using pattern-recognition based methods of sorting, so just because its not a walking, talking robot doesn't mean its not A.I.
The particular form of machine learning used by AlphaZero (reinforcement learning) is, in my view, a stronger flavour of artificial intelligence than those types that are most widely used (mainly supervised learning).
Surely most people would agree that a computer learning everything about how to play chess successfully from experience - only starting with knowledge of what moves are legal and what the objective of the game is - is very much artificial intelligence. By comparison, a neural network that learns to recognise which photos contain cats is impressive but has done less on its own.
I think there's another forum discussing this subject/subjects too. I just posted in it.
But there - they're talking about jobs being replaced by machines.