A Quick Primer on Self-Play in Deep Reinforcement Learning

"Train tirelessly to defeat the greatest enemy, yourself, and to discover the greatest master, yourself" DeepMind has created AI that will crush any human player in Go, Chess, Shogi, and Starcraft 2. OpenAI has made similar strides in complex strategy games, notably in Dota 2. The agents in these games all achieved mastery using deep reinforcement learning. Yet, this is only part of the story. What was the magic sauce that sent these systems' playing ability out of the atmosphere? A simple framework called self-play, where your opponent is yourself. Self-play is a framework where an agent learns to play a game by playing against itself.