In 2016, a computer Go-playing program called AlphaGo stunned the (human) world by winning a match (4 games to 1) against the reigning human world champion, a feat more impressive than previous victories by computer programs in chess (Deep Blue) and the TV game show Jeopardy! (Watson). The main engine behind AlphaGo combines machine learning approaches in the form of deep neural networks with a technique called
Monte Carlo tree search, whose roots can be traced back to an adaptive multistage sampling simulation-based algorithm for Markov decision processes (MDPs) published in Operations Research in 2005 [H. S. Chang, M. C. Fu, J. Hu, and S. I. Marcus. An adaptive sampling algorithm for solving Markov decision processes. Operations Research 53(1):126–139, 2005] (and introduced even earlier in 2002). This tutorial describes AlphaGo and the simulation-based MDP algorithm, as well as providing contextual and historical background material for both, and uses simple examples to illustrate the main ideas behind Monte Carlo tree search.