Answers.Body: <p>The more you read, the more deeply you can understand any paper, but given your stated background, reading the Monte-Carlo Tree Search chapter of Barto &amp; Sutton, plus Gerald Tesauro's <a href="https://cling.csd.uwo.ca/cs346a/extra/tdgammon.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">TD-Gammon paper</a> (which is pretty accessible, and which is the basis for the <em>other</em> technique used in AlphaZero) should be enough to get a pretty good idea of what they did. </p>
  
Answers.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Answers.CreationDate: 2019-06-19T00:18:36.000Z
Answers.LastActivityDate: 2019-06-19T20:49:32.273Z
Answers.LastEditDate: 2019-06-19T20:49:32.273Z
Answers.UserDisplayName: John Doucette
Body: <p>My goal is to understand AlphaZero paper published by deepmind. I'm beginning my journey trying to get the basic intuition of reinforcement learning from the <a href="https://web.stanford.edu/class/psych209/Readings/SuttonBartoIPRLBook2ndEd.pdf" rel="nofollow noreferrer">book</a> by Barto and Sutton.</p>
  <p>As per my background, I'm familiar with MDPs, value iteration and policy iteration.</p>
  <p>I wanted to ask until what chapter of Barto and Sutton's book is one required to read in order to fully comprehend AlphaZero's paper. Monte-Carlo Tree Search is discussed in Chapter-8 of the book. Will it be enough till that? Or would I be needing more resources apart from this book?</p>
  
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2019-06-18T21:12:16.810Z
Comments.Text: Start reading the paper and look up the things that you don't understand or ask a question about it.
Comments.UserDisplayName: Brale
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2019-06-20T01:24:36.223Z
Comments.Text: After completing the relevant chapter of the book, I would suggest you take a look at the cited references in the paper (especially those parts that you feel you need more materials).
Comments.UserDisplayName: Borhan Kazimipour
Comments.ContentLicense: CC BY-SA 4.0
Comments.CreationDate: 2021-10-12T08:50:28.683Z
Comments.Text: @Brale yes, this worked for me with GPT-2... however, the tree of unknowns is quite deep!
Comments.UserDisplayName: Criticize SE actions means ban
Tags: <reinforcement-learning><papers><alphazero><sutton-barto>
Title: What knowledge is required for understanding the AlphaZero paper?
UserDisplayName: Laschet Jain
ThreadText: # What knowledge is required for understanding the AlphaZero paper?
  
  (Asked by: username_0 on 2019-06-18)
  
  My goal is to understand AlphaZero paper published by deepmind. I'm beginning my journey trying to get the basic intuition of reinforcement learning from the [book](https://web.stanford.edu/class/psych209/Readings/SuttonBartoIPRLBook2ndEd.pdf) by Barto and Sutton.
  
  As per my background, I'm familiar with MDPs, value iteration and policy iteration.
  
  I wanted to ask until what chapter of Barto and Sutton's book is one required to read in order to fully comprehend AlphaZero's paper. Monte-Carlo Tree Search is discussed in Chapter-8 of the book. Will it be enough till that? Or would I be needing more resources apart from this book?
  
  **Tags:** reinforcement-learning, papers, alphazero, sutton-barto
  > **Comments:**
  > **username_1**: Start reading the paper and look up the things that you don't understand or ask a question about it.  
  > **username_2**: After completing the relevant chapter of the book, I would suggest you take a look at the cited references in the paper (especially those parts that you feel you need more materials).  
  > **username_3**: @Brale yes, this worked for me with GPT-2... however, the tree of unknowns is quite deep!  
  
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  ## 1 answers
  
  ### Answer by username_4 on 2019-06-19. Score: 4 | Accepted answer
  
  The more you read, the more deeply you can understand any paper, but given your stated background, reading the Monte-Carlo Tree Search chapter of Barto & Sutton, plus Gerald Tesauro's [TD-Gammon paper](https://cling.csd.uwo.ca/cs346a/extra/tdgammon.pdf) (which is pretty accessible, and which is the basis for the *other* technique used in AlphaZero) should be enough to get a pretty good idea of what they did.
  
  
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