Does "fairly faithful reimplementation" not reflect this nuance? I'm not sure what you think was missing from the Alpha Go Zero paper in terms of methods, BTW.

Does "fairly faithful reimplementation" not reflect this nuance? I'm not sure what you think was missing from the Alpha Go Zero paper in terms of methods, BTW. The whole thing was fairly simple [1] and all the knowledge is discovered. I think that was DeepMind's point. Of course if Alpha Go Zero had some proprietary secret sauces that they omitted from the paper and that are needed for things to converge or whatever, you are right. [1] I mean if you look at the code, most of it is a fast Go engine, and code to compute a residual network stack on the GPU. These aren't things that the DeepMind paper has to spell out.