  Humans tend to learn complex abstract concepts faster if examples are
presented in a structured manner. For instance, when learning how to play a
board game, usually one of the first concepts learned is how the game ends,
i.e. the actions that lead to a terminal state (win, lose or draw). The
advantage of learning end-games first is that once the actions which lead to a
terminal state are understood, it becomes possible to incrementally learn the
consequences of actions that are further away from a terminal state - we call
this an end-game-first curriculum. Currently the state-of-the-art machine
learning player for general board games, AlphaZero by Google DeepMind, does not
employ a structured training curriculum; instead learning from the entire game
at all times. By employing an end-game-first training curriculum to train an
AlphaZero inspired player, we empirically show that the rate of learning of an
artificial player can be improved during the early stages of training when
compared to a player not using a training curriculum.
