[uzerfcwn]

I find it interesting how the author's first approach was to use a black box neural network instead of the evidently simpler beam search. As far as I'm aware, beam search was widely considered to be the simple method for game optimization just a decade ago.

Sure, new methods will always replace old methods, just like CNNs replaced SIFT for image processing. However, I feel that beam search is one of those elementary methods that you'd always want to check first, similar to A* and quicksort. Even though there are fancy neural networks for game optimization, pathfinding and sorting, it's easier to get started with elementary methods because they're simple and tractable.

[TheCog]

The main impetus was trying to show that you could do AlphaZero on a regular computer. It didn't pan out that way.