In late 2016, an anonymous player called Master and Magister logged onto elite online Go servers and beat the world's best human players 60 times in a row without a single loss. It was an upgraded version of AlphaGo. This deep dive tells the biography of that machine, starting with why Go resisted computers for decades after chess fell in 1997: a 19 by 19 board with more possible configurations than atoms in the observable universe, where brute force fails and masters rely on intuition and aesthetic sense.

The hosts explain DeepMind's dual network architecture, a policy network that prunes possibilities and a value network that predicts outcomes, combined with Monte Carlo tree search, trained first on 30 million human moves and then through self-play with injected randomness that shed human bias. They cover the secret 5-0 win over European  ...