[seanwilson]

Can anyone elaborate on how they would teach it from scratch? Would this mean only giving it the ability to play valid moves (and against itself) and give it access to the final score?

[eru]

Basically. They'd start with random moves.

That worked with backgammon without any problems. (http://www.bkgm.com/articles/tesauro/tdl.html)

In Go, a naive approach would probably also work, but would take ages. There's probably a slightly smarter approach possible.