# Is which sense was AlphaGo "just given a rule book"?

I was told that AlphaGo (or some related program) was not explicitly taught even the rules of Go -- if it was "just given the rulebook", what does this mean? Literally, a book written in English to read?

• Most likely, they refer to an encoding of rules of Go. Nov 6, 2020 at 19:47
• okay, how is this encoding done with a neural network? Nov 6, 2020 at 19:50
• je ne sais pas :( Nov 6, 2020 at 19:58

Instead, "just given the rulebook" is a rough metaphor for what actually happened: The rules of Go were implemented as functions that the game-playing agent could query. The functions can answer things such as "when the board looks like this, what are my valid actions?" and "if the board looks like this, have I won yet?". The board state might be represented by a matrix with stone positions encoded using numbers. Outputs might be a similar matrix of numbers for valid action choices (where the player is allowed to put stones in Go) or perhaps a single number, $$0$$ for not won yet, $$1$$ for a move that wins the game.