Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with General Reinforcement Learning
This is an incredible demonstration that the AG Zero expert iteration method is a general method. If you go back to the discussions of AG Zero lo a month ago, there was a lot of skepticism that NNs would ever challenge Stockfish et al - they are just too good, too close to perfection, and chess not well suited for MCTS and NNs. Well, it turns out that AG Zero doesn't work as well in chess: it works <i>better</i> as it only takes 4 hours of training to beat Stockfish. This is going to be an impetus for researchers to explore solving many more MDPs than just chess or Go using expert iteration... ("There is no fire alarm.")