From random moves to World Champion: The incredible rise of AlphaZero in just one day.

Added: 2026-05-16

[00:00:00]So, you can imagine what happens is AlphaZero starts off random to begin with. It It just It only has the rules of the game. Plays randomly. Obviously, it's terrible at playing.

[00:00:10]It creates its own data set by playing 100,000 games against itself, right? And then it can see what which moves won or lost. And even though it's playing more or less randomly to begin with, there'll be some moves that are slightly better than other moves. Okay? So, now it takes the 100,000 it we train a new version of itself on version two now of AlphaZero with that new data. That version two is slightly better than version one. So, now it's not random anymore, but it's not great. It's not good, but it's playing like okay moves. And then those okay moves end up being better. And so, then a version two gets trained, a version three, a version four. And so, each time that new system gets played against the old system and sees is it significantly better or not.

[00:00:53]And it turns out that at least in Go and chess and things like that, around 16-17 generations of that is enough to go from random to better than world champion.

[00:01:03]And at least in the case of chess, which I actually once watched live happen cuz I was fascinated by obviously playing chess myself, is you know, it starts in the morning random. Then, you know, by lunchtime, I could still just about compete with it myself. And then by teatime, it's better than all grandmasters. And then by dinnertime, it's better than the world champion. And you've just seen the entire evolution of that from scratch. And also, it's playing interesting new chess that that even chess computers like Stockfish, um you know, with the more the kind of expert system brute force ones, haven't discovered those types of new types of moves. So, AlphaZero was the full generalization of the AlphaGo ideas.