Most scientific and engineering advancements are an incremental combination of what has come before. One can make all the predictions one wants, but until someo

Most scientific and engineering advancements are an incremental combination of what has come before. One can make all the predictions one wants, but until someone actually builds something working, it's just a hypothesis. The key advancement in AlphaGo seems to be generating a subset good moves, as opposed to randomly selecting them, and determining whether a given configuration has a probability of winning. Monte Carlo Tree Search by itself only gets you to amateur ranks from what I read, but won't beat a pro player. Being able to combine the policy and value networks, and figuring out how to bootstrap and train them was where all the work is. In hindsight, everything looks like an obvious combination of separate already-known-to-be-good pieces. I don't think this achievement should be hand waved away. More importantly, the DeepMind folks are being pretty humble about it and not making the big claims everything seems to think they're making.