Training AlphaZero in Google Colab

Moving along with Kaggle's push into reinforcement learning (RL), I've been diving more into RL algorithms and at the same time working out which can realistically be trained (we don't all have an army of GPUs!). In this article I discuss how I trained an agent to play connect four at human-level in under 4 hours using Google's online notebook system Collaboratory. The article is fully replicable, you can find the notebook here, train your own agent and see for yourself just how amazing the power of AlphaZero Colab Julia is! Before diving into it, first a bit of background on the key components, if you're not interested in any, please skip ahead to the next section. AlphaZero is a reinforcement learning program first shared in 2017 by Deepmind. It is able to play Go, Shogi, and Chess, three uniquely complex strategy games.