michael_nielsen

I read and reread the paper several times, as well as consulting a lot of adjacent papers, Wikipedia etc.

I added several hundred Anki cards while doing.

The early cards were mostly very simple things: facts about TDGammon (which used a similar approach to beat Backgammon), very basic facts about how Go works, and reinforcement learning and Monte Carlo Tree search.

Later, the facts got more and more complex.

Of course, I didn't master all the literature around the paper. But I think I made pretty rapid progress coming up to speed.

Now, just to write one article that wouldn't necessarily have been a good use of time. But a nice thing about Anki is that the information is retained. When the AlphaGo Zero and AlphaZero papers came out, they were very easy to read.

Verb form: I talk and think of "Ankifying" a paper or book etc.

It's easy to overdo it, especially initially, and waste time Ankifying useless info. Over time, I've found myself cultivating heuristics for how much to Ankify.