Deep Learning and the Game of Go

Chapter 13. AlphaGo: Bringing it all together

This chapter covers

• Diving into the guiding principles that led Go bots to play at superhuman strength
• Using tree search, supervised deep learning, and reinforcement learning to build such a bot
• Implementing your own version of DeepMind’s AlphaGo engine

When DeepMind’s Go bot AlphaGo played move 37 of game 2 against Lee Sedol in 2016, it took the Go world by storm. Commentator Michael Redmond, a professional player with nearly a thousand top-level games under his belt, did a double-take on air; he even briefly removed the stone from the demo board while looking around as if to confirm that AlphaGo made the right move. (“I still don’t really understand the mechanics of it,” Redmond told the American ...