It was really hard to track down the developers of Leela Chess Zero, the highest rated chess engine today, but I managed to find them in a developer forum. It was interesting to learn that the developers are not professional chess players and they don't even need to be to develop such an algorithm. Imagine the same in medicine. Developers creating the highest rated medical algorithm without having a profound knowledge of medicine. This is the era artificial intelligence is bringing to us. Here is how they described the algorithm works: "Leela Chess uses a neural network trained without human knowledge. The training procedure uses reinforcement learning to train the next generation of the network based on games played using the previous one against itself (“self-play”) so without any external influence. The initial network is trained using random games so there is no human input in the process. The next network improvement comes from using a (small) search tree to improve the neural network’s evaluation of a position and using this outcome, together with the game result, to train the next network. Any principles used during play are discovered this way, but not in a way that can be easily extracted as such. Obviously, the rules of chess are hard-coded in the engine." …see more