AI Behind AlphaGo: Machine Learning and Neural Network - USC Viterbi School of Engineering

AI Behind AlphaGo: Machine Learning and Neural Network - USC Viterbi School of Engineering 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
 
 
 

 
 


 


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 

 
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 Sunday, February 22, 2026 
 
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 About the Author: Yiqing Xu 

 

 Yiqing Xu is a senior studying Computer Science with an interest in a variety of programming languages and a solid math background.

 
 Abstract 

 The board game Go has been viewed as one of the most challenging tasks for artificial intelligence because it is “complex, pattern-based and hard to program”. The computer program AlphaGo’s victory over Lee Sedol became a huge moment in the history of artificial intelligence and computer engineering. We can observe AlphaGo’s enormous capacity,  but people know little about how it “thinks”. AlphaGo’s rules are learned and not designed, implementing machine learning as well as several neural networks to create a learning component and become better at Go. Seen in its partnership with the UK’s National Health Service, AlphaGo has promising applications in other realms as well. 

 Background 

 From March 9 to March 15 in 2016, a Go game competition took place between the world’s second-highest ranking professional player, Lee Sedol, and AlphaGo, a computer program created by Google’s DeepMind Company. AlphaGo’s 4-1 victory over Lee Sedol became a significant moment in the history of artificial intelligence. This was the first time that a computer had beaten a human professional at Go. Most major South Korean television networks carried the game. In China, 60 million people watched it; the American Go Association and DeepMind’s English-language livestream of it on YouTube had 100,000 viewers. A few hundred members of the press watched the game alongside expert commentators [1]. What makes this game so important? To understand this, we have to understand the roots of Go first. 

 Go Game 

 Go, known as weiqi in China and igo in Japan, is an abstract board game for two players that dates back 3,000 years. It is a board game of abstract strategy played across a 19*19 grid. Go starts with an empty board. At each turn, a player places a black or white stone on the board [2]. The general objective of the game is to use the stones to surround more territory than the opponent. Although the rule is very simple, it creates a challenge of depth and nuance. Thus, the board game, Go, has been viewed as one of the most challenging tasks for ar

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