I gave this talk at Full Stack Fest (achievement unlocked!) and I practised it before at Strange Group. It’s designed to not really require any previous knowledge (Go, Monte Carlo Tree Search and Neural Networks are all introduced). It was a lot of fun putting together and so far the feedback has also been great. Additional shout out to the strange group folks who helped cut some content so that I landed perfectly on the 40 minutes mark :) In case you want to see it live, the talk will be up again at Codemotion Berlin.

Abstract

This year AlphaGo shocked the world by decisively beating the strongest human Go player, Lee Sedol. An accomplishment that wasn’t expected for years to come. How did AlphaGo do this? What algorithms did it use? What advances in AI made it possible? This talk will briefly introduce the game of Go, followed by the techniques and algorithms used by AlphaGo to answer these questions.

Slides