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Search, simulation, and science compute

Search, simulation, self-play, and scientific structure prediction combine neural networks with structured inference.

12 papers Regime 10 of 10

Search, simulation, and science compute

Device/setup

CPU/GPU/TPU actor-learner systems, search servers, simulators, and science pipelines that mix learned models with explicit exploration or optimization.

Bottleneck

Environment simulation, tree search, self-play data generation, long-horizon credit assignment, and scientific structure search dominate simple forward-pass cost.

Methods that fit

DQN replay, AlphaGo/AlphaZero/MuZero search, AlphaStar/OpenAI Five league self-play, and AlphaFold-style learned potentials or structure prediction adapt learning to simulation and scientific optimization.

Methods that became obsolete or less central

Pure supervised imitation, handcrafted game heuristics, and classical sampling pipelines became less central where learned models could guide search or simulation at scale.

Representative papers

Rank Year Paper Priority Status
111 2015 Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning 5 downloaded / read_complete
112 2016 Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search 5 downloaded / read_complete
113 2017 Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge 5 downloaded / read_complete
114 2021 Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold 5 downloaded / read_complete
115 2018 A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play 4 downloaded / read_complete
116 2019 Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model 4 downloaded / read_complete
117 2024 Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3 4 downloaded / read_complete
118 2019 Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning 3 html_saved_no_open_pdf / read_complete
119 2019 Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning 3 downloaded / read_complete
120 2020 Improved protein structure prediction using potentials from deep learning 3 downloaded / read_complete
127 2025 Gold-medalist Performance in Solving Olympiad Geometry with AlphaGeometry2 4 downloaded / read_complete
128 2025 AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery 5 downloaded / read_complete

Open questions

  • Compare game/simulation compute with scientific inference pipelines without collapsing both into generic deep learning.

Papers in this compute regime 12

2015 Human-level control through deep reinforcement learning
2016 Mastering the game of Go with deep neural networks and tree search
2017 Mastering the game of Go without human knowledge
2021 Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
2018 A general reinforcement learning algorithm that masters chess, shogi, and Go through self-play
2019 Mastering Atari, Go, chess and shogi by planning with a learned model
2024 Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular interactions with AlphaFold 3
2019 Grandmaster level in StarCraft II using multi-agent reinforcement learning
2019 Dota 2 with Large Scale Deep Reinforcement Learning
2020 Improved protein structure prediction using potentials from deep learning
2025 Gold-medalist Performance in Solving Olympiad Geometry with AlphaGeometry2
2025 AlphaEvolve: A coding agent for scientific and algorithmic discovery