Definition
Plain language
DeepMind's Go-playing AI that beat human champions and inspired a lot of later RL work.
As stated in the literature
DeepMind's neural-net-plus-MCTS system that defeated top human Go players and became a reference point for the claim that RL discovers novel strategies.
Why it matters: It's the standard reference point for the claim that reinforcement learning can find strategies humans miss.
For example, AlphaGo's move 37 against Lee Sedol was a play no top human would have made, yet it turned out to be brilliant.
Heard on the show
“It's the same explore-exploit idea behind Monte Carlo Tree Search — the search family underneath AlphaGo.”Episode 139 — When Optimizing One GPU Kernel Quietly Breaks the Whole System