michael_nielsen

Reading papers and books and watching videos. This is especially helpful for building mastery outside your area of expertise. You can (say) read a paper multiple times through, each time just grabbing what is easy, gradually building up an understanding.

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.