[ScientiFika] Search, Sample, Learn: Chess in the age of AlphaZero

by William D Arcy Kenworthy (Stockholm University)

Friday 7 Nov 2025, 16:00 → 17:30 Europe/Stockholm

Floor 6 - Fika Area (AlbaNova Main Building)

Early AI researchers focused on games like chess as a proving ground for machine intelligence. In this talk we’ll trace the evolution of chess robots from expert-encoded knowledge to AlphaZero in 2017, which learned chess from scratch in 9 hours of self-play and crushed the best traditional engines. We’ll walk through the key concepts of computer chess including minimax search, alpha-beta pruning, Monte Carlo tree search, and neural networks. We’ll wrap up with how these methods have since been applied to more complex games like poker, Go, and StarCraft.

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Note: This event is open to the junior audience only, including undergraduate, master’s, and PhD students, as well as postdocs.