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 runs MCTS — Monte Carlo Tree Search, the same family of algorithms that powered AlphaGo — over thousands of possible workflow variants, scoring each on a small validation set, keeping the best one.”Episode 013 — Why Search Keeps Rediscovering the Same Workflow, and What That Means