Nature publishes the paper behind AlphaGo
Nature published “Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search” by David Silver, Demis Hassabis and 18 co-authors at Google DeepMind. It disclosed that AlphaGo had already beaten the European champion Fan Hui five games to nil in October 2015.
Why it mattered The paper set out the method AlphaGo used and revealed a match held back for three months. Six weeks later the program played Lee Sedol in Seoul.
Corrections
-
2026-09-07 - The Google Research listing of this paper was labeled a secondary source. It is Google’s own index of its researchers’ paper, not independent reporting, so it is relabeled primary.
-
2026-09-13: Added the missing publication date (2016-01-27) for the Google Research source.