24 June 2021

From Tic Tac Toe to AlphaGo: Playing games with AI


Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo was an extraordinary breakthrough for Artificial Intelligence. The game of Go has 1.7410^172 unique positions and is about a ‘googol’ times harder to calculate than chess. Experts thought it would take at least another decade before A.I. would be able to beat the best human players. So how did DeepMind tackle this problem? What algorithms did they use and how do they work? During this talk we’ll explore several algorithms that can be used to make a program play games, we’ll start simple (Tic Tac Toe) and as the games get harder, the A.I.’s need to become smarter.


Roy van Rijn

Director at OpenValue Rotterdam, Java Champion, JavaOne Rockstar, founder of the Rotterdam JUG, public speaker, blogger, loves: agile, cryptography, math, algorithms!