Agreed. If we announce that A* search is superhuman in finding best routes, most technorati would't bat an eye. Technically it is probably accurate to say that

Agreed. If we announce that A* search is superhuman in finding best routes, most technorati would't bat an eye. Technically it is probably accurate to say that the results here show that neural networks can find good heuristics for MCTS search through unsupervised training in the game of Go. According to DeepMind authors: "These search probabilities usually select much stronger moves than the raw move probabilities of the neural network; MCTS may therefore be viewed as a powerful policy improvement operator. Self-play with search – using the improved MCTS-based policy to select each move, then using the game winner as a sample of the value – may be viewed as a powerful policy evaluation operator. The main idea of our reinforcement learning algorithm is to use these search operators repeatedly in a policy iteration procedure ..." The fact that this reinforcement training is unsupervised from the very beginning is quite exciting and may lead to better heuristics for other kinds of combinatorial optimization problems.