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arXiv:1911.08265cs.LG

Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model

Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Thomas Hubert, Karen Simonyan, Laurent Sifre, Simon Schmitt, Arthur Guez, Edward Lockhart, Demis Hassabis, Thore Graepel, Timothy Lillicrap, David Silver

Abstract

Constructing agents with planning capabilities has long been one of the main challenges in the pursuit of artificial intelligence. Tree-based planning methods have enjoyed huge success in challenging domains, such as chess and Go, where a perfect simulator is available. However, in real-world problems the dynamics governing the environment are often complex and unknown. In this work we present the MuZero algorithm which, by combining a tree-based search with a learned model, achieves superhuman performance in a range of challenging and visually complex domains, without any knowledge of their underlying dynamics. MuZero learns a model that, when applied iteratively, predicts the quantities most directly relevant to planning: the reward, the action-selection policy, and the value function. When evaluated on 57 different Atari games - the canonical video game environment for testing AI techniques, in which model-based planning approaches have historically struggled - our new algorithm achieved a new state of the art. When evaluated on Go, chess and shogi, without any knowledge of the game rules, MuZero matched the superhuman performance of the AlphaZero algorithm that was supplied with the game rules.

arXiv comments
Journal reference
DOI
doi:10.1038/s41586-020-03051-4
Subjects
cs.LGMachine Learning stat.MLMachine Learning (Statistics)

On Hacker News

Linked by 14 identifiable commenters in 14 comments across 12 threads, from Nov 2019 to Sep 2025. Found in 3 HN submissions from Nov 2019 to Nov 2023. Open submission discussions.

Comments linking this paper, per year.

Discussed in comments12 threads

    • During play, yes, obviously you need an implementation of the game to play it. But in its planning tree, no: > MuZero only masks legal actions at the root of the search tree where the environment can be queried, but does not perform any masking within the search tree. This is…

      huliumView on HNParent context

    • totally! MuZero is my favourite[1] The super cool thing about MuZero is that it learns the dynamics of the problem, i.e. you don't have to give it the rules of the game, which makes the algorithm very general. For example, DeepMind threw MuZero at video compression and found…

      not-my-accountView on HNParent context

    • AI Research Residency Program (1 year) | Zug/Zurich area | Full time | On site | 100-200k CHF/annum I am launching a new AI research organisation in the Zug/Zurich area. The goal of the organisation is to make a meaningful contribution towards solving AGI. I am looking for…

      notacatView on HNParent context

  1. 10x (engineer, context) pairs 1 comment
    • > Most people will both lose time with false-start approaches that are scrapped To a discerning eye this pattern looks like stronger minds implementing higher quality tree search[1], either through implementing higher quality neural search heuristics for tree pruning or via…

      sinenomineView on HNParent context

    • This is celebrating their Nature publication today. Here is the preprint: https://deepmind.com/research/publications/Mastering-Atari-G... https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08265.pdf

      bshanksView on HNParent context

    • This is explained in Appendix A of the paper ("Comparison to AlphaZero"): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1911.08265.pdf Basically, AlphaZero was provided with a simulator that was able to distinguish legal and illegal moves and determine which future game states would be wins or losses.…

      ignorancepriorView on HNParent context

    • After AlphaZero, DeepMind went on to develop MuZero (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MuZero, paper: https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08265), which is able to learn to play games without being provided an explicit model of their rules. "When evaluated on Go, chess and shogi, without any…

      RiversHaveWingsView on HNParent context

  2. The Bitter Lesson (2019) 1 comment
    • MuZero performs a "formal search". In many more ways than one, for example optimisation is still a search for an optimal search of parameters. But I guess you mean that it doesn't perform a tree search? Quoting from the abstract of the paper on arxiv [1]: In this work we present…

      YeGoblynQueenneView on HNParent context

    • I agree that is vague. But there are plenty of RL algorithms that learn with essentially no domain knowledge, e.g., MuZero[1] which doesn't even use a model. That doesn't make it AGI -- it only masters a single game at a time and we currently don't know how to transfer that…

      johnmobergView on HNParent context

    • Check out MuZero. It learns an embedding of the game's state space potentially allowing AlphaGo like dominance in more ways. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=We20YSAJZSE https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08265 (Actually, ML is still not very good at causal reasoning so we have sometime.…

      swframe2View on HNParent context

    • > no AI that I know of has at its disposal a full blown model of the world it operates in This is a field called Model-based Reinforcement learning, and it's quite advanced already -- there are indeed models that have an internal state reflecting the world state. A good recent…

      darkmightyView on HNParent context

    • Instead of an alpha-beta search, AlphaZero uses a general-purpose Monte Carlo tree search (MCTS) algorithm. Source: https://science.sciencemag.org/content/362/6419/1140.full I agree with your comment about System 2 like reasoning not being common right now. I am not an expert in…

      davidhowlettView on HNParent context

    • There are certainly challenges, but "incorporating a world model" has been going well recently: "Mastering Atari, Go, Chess and Shogi by Planning with a Learned Model" https://arxiv.org/abs/1911.08265

      nmcaView on HNParent context

    • From the preprint [1]: > In Go, MuZero slightly exceeded the performance of AlphaZero, despite using less computation per node in the search tree (16 residual blocks per evaluation in MuZero compared to 20 blocks in AlphaZero). This suggests that MuZero may be caching its…

      gokView on HNParent context

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