About three years ago, DeepMind, a company owned by Google that specializes in AI development, turned its attention to the ancient game of Go. Go had been the one game that had eluded all computer efforts to become world class, and even up until the announcement was deemed a goal that would not be attained for another decade! This was how large the difference was. When a public challenge and match was organized against the legendary player Lee Sedol, a South Korean whose track record had him in the ranks of the greatest ever, everyone thought it would be an interesting spectacle, but a certain win by the human. The question wasn't even whether the program AlphaGo would win or lose, but how much closer it was to the Holy Grail goal.

One thing I was curious about is whether AlphaZero can play endgames. For example, a friend brought up whether AlphaZero could learn how to play Nim. For anybody who isn't familiar: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nim, the optimal strategy for Nim involves computing the xor of all the heap sizes. I thought no, largely due to the lack of gradient information/lack of structure/MCTS not being a good heuristic for the quality of the move. However, this game of Nim doesn't seem that different from say, a knight-bishop end game mating scenario for chess.