The 3 Tricks That Made AlphaGo Zero Work – Seth Weidman – Medium

There were many advances in Deep Learning and AI in 2017, but few generated as much publicity and interest as DeepMind's AlphaGo Zero. This program was truly a shocking breakthrough: not only did it beat the prior version of AlphaGo -- the program that beat 17 time world champion Lee Sedol just a year and a half earlier -- 100–0, it was trained without any data from real human games. Xavier Amatrain called it "more [significant] than anything…in the last 5 years" in Machine Learning. So how did DeepMind do it? In this essay, I'll try to give an intuitive idea of the techniques AlphaGo Zero used, what made them work, and what the implications for future AI research are.