In late 2017 we introduced AlphaZero, a single system that taught itself from scratch how to master the games of chess, shogi (Japanese chess), and Go, beating a world-champion program in each case. We were excited by the preliminary results and thrilled to see the response from members of the chess community, who saw in AlphaZero’s games a ground-breaking, highly dynamic and “unconventional” style of play that differed from any chess playing engine that came before it.

Today, we are delighted to introduce the full evaluation of AlphaZero, published in the journal Science (Open Access version here), that confirms and updates those preliminary results. It describes how AlphaZero quickly learns each game to become the strongest player in history for each, despite starting its training from random play, with no in-built domain knowledge but the basic rules of the game.