David Silver
Principal Research Scientist, Google DeepMind | Professor, UCL | Lead of AlphaGo & AlphaZero
Principal Research Scientist at Google DeepMind and Professor of Computer Science at University College London (UCL). ACM Prize in Computing recipient. Renowned globally as the research lead behind AlphaGo (which defeated world champion Lee Sedol in 2016), AlphaGo Zero (learning Go tabula rasa without human games), AlphaZero (mastering Go, chess, and shogi), and MuZero (planning without a known model).
Areas of focus
Professional niches
Proof of Work
Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm (AlphaZero)
Created AlphaZero, which mastered Go, chess, and shogi starting completely from scratch tabula rasa given only the game rules, crushing world-champion engines Stockfish and Elmo within 24 hours of self-play.
Assumes deterministic, fully observable game dynamics with explicit simulator rules.
Context: Single deep residual neural network updating continuous MCTS action evaluations across 5,000 TPU v1s.
View missionMastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search (AlphaGo)
Led the AlphaGo project combining deep value networks and policy networks with Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS), solving the 2,500-year-old game of Go and defeating 18-time world champion Lee Sedol 4-1 in Seoul.
Initial AlphaGo version relied on 30 million human expert games for supervised pretraining prior to self-play.
Context: 12-layer deep convolutional policy and value networks trained across 48 Google TPUs.
View mission