is the place to be every Friday afternoon if you want to learn more about a variety of research fields while enjoying delicious Fika! We bring together researchers across different universities in Stockholm to share their passion for science and related topics, while nourishing a deep sense of community among junior researchers.

Upcoming

Friday 16:00 @ Nordita 6th floor

Search, Sample, Learn: Chess in the age of AlphaZero
Title Image of Talk Search, Sample, Learn: Chess in the age of AlphaZero
Title Image of Talk Search, Sample, Learn: Chess in the age of AlphaZero
2025-11-07 ✨ Open to juniors* ✨ D'Arcy Kenworthy

Early AI researchers focused on games like chess as a proving ground for machine intelligence. In this talk we’ll trace the evolution of chess robots from expert-encoded knowledge to AlphaZero in 2017, which learned chess from scratch in 9 hours of self-play and crushed the best traditional engines. We’ll walk through the key concepts of computer chess including minimax search, alpha-beta pruning, Monte Carlo tree search, and neural networks. We’ll wrap up with how these methods have since been applied to more complex games like poker, Go, and StarCraft.

*Junior audience is a term that encompasses undergraduate, master's, and PhD students, as well as postdocs.
📋 Join the Mailing List 🧑‍🏫 Give a Talk! 📊 Attendance Form 📬 Suggestion Box