AlphaGo Zero: The Most Significant Research Advance in AI

Recently Google DeepMind program AlphaGo Zero achieved superhuman level without any help - entirely by self-play! Here is the Nature paper explaining technical details (also PDF version: Mastering the Game of Go without Human Knowledge) One of the main reasons for success was the use of a novel form of Reinforcement learning in which AlphaGo learned by playing itself. The system starts with a neural net that does not know anything about Go. It plays millions of games against itself and tuned the neural network to predict next move and the eventual winner of the games. The updated neural network was merged with the Monte Carlo Tree Search algorithm to create a new and stronger version of AlphaGo Zero, and the process resumed.