I would submit that we already have an example of self-play being used as part of a strategy to learn chess: chess problems. Something like "Here's a board pos

I would submit that we already have an example of self-play being used as part of a strategy to learn chess: chess problems. Something like "Here's a board position. It looks utterly hopeless but the problem says "Black to mate in 7 moves". How can you get there from here without relying on White making any beginner's mistakes?" is pretty much self-play.