361^300 possible game trees
A 19x19 Go board has roughly 361 possible moves per turn over ~300 moves, producing a game tree larger than the number of atoms in the universe.
Where this was said
Monte Carlo Tree Search
At 10:24 · chapter starts 8:17
Eric walks through the UCB1 bandit algorithm and AlphaGo's PUCT variant — how visit counts, Q-values, and prior probabilities are balanced to explore and exploit.
Why Go Is a Hard Problem for Computers
A 19x19 Go board generates a game tree larger than atoms in the universe — 361 to the power of 300. This isn't just big, it's a fundamentally different class of problem from chess, which is why computer scientists thought Go was unsolvable this century.
MCTS: How AlphaGo Thinks Before Moving
MCTS doesn't build the whole tree — it builds it interactively while searching. Selection, expansion, evaluation, backup: these four steps run hundreds or thousands of times per move, concentrating compute on the branches that matter.
The Policy and Value Networks: What They Do
AlphaGo's neural network does two things: predict who's going to win (value head), and predict which moves are worth trying (policy head). Train this on human expert games and you already get a very strong Go player before any search.
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