Eric Jang Explains Go Strategy Challenges Behind AlphaGo's Breakthrough

.@ericjang11 explains the fundamental intuition behind AlphaGo: experienced Go players almost always end games early.

That means they have the ability to glance at a board and instantly know whether it's hopeless or if they should keep playing.

Without this ability, the only way to know if a move is good is to play out every possible game from that point - completely intractable.

But the ability is clearly trainable in humans. So it should be possible to get a neural net to learn it.

And if you have a good enough neural net, you can use it to ignore moves that will definitely make you lose. Suddenly search becomes tractable.