A few simple rules ... limitless possibilities

The AlphaGo v Lee Sedol match is now less than 24 hours away. Are you ready? Will you be getting up early? What are you planning for the weekend? Watch our status page here.

At the Press Conference in Seoul this morning, Alphabet (parent company of Google) executive chairman Eric Schmidt said “The winner here, no matter who wins, is humanity”.

Lee Sedol seemed very confident from the various Korean news items, although he's backtracked a little at this Press Conference, being quoted by the BBC as saying "Playing against a machine is very different from an actual human opponent. Normally, you can sense your opponent’s breathing, their energy. And lots of times you make decisions which are dependent on the physical reactions of the person you’re playing against.

The following details of the match have been announced today:

The matches will be held at the Four Seasons Hotel, Seoul, starting at 1pm local time (4am GMT) on the following days:

• Wednesday, March 9: First match
• Thursday, March 10: Second match
• Saturday, March 12: Third match
• Sunday, March 13: Fourth match
• Tuesday, March 15: Fifth match

The games will be even (no handicap), with $1 million in prize money for the winner. If AlphaGo wins, the prize money will be donated to UNICEF, STEM and Go charities. The matches will be played under Chinese rules with a komi of 7.5 (the compensation points the player who goes second receives at the end of the match). Each player will receive two hours per match with three x 60­ seconds byoyomi.

The ancient Chinese game of Go is one of the last games where the best human players can still beat the best artificial intelligence players. Last year, the Facebook AI Research team started creating an AI that can learn to play Go.

Scientists have been trying to teach computers to win at Go for 20 years. We're getting close, and in the past six months we've built an AI that can make moves in as fast as 0.1 seconds and still be as good as previous systems that took years to build. Our AI combines a search-based approach that models every possible move as the game progresses along with a pattern matching system built by our computer vision team.

The researcher who works on this, Yuandong Tian, sits about 20 feet from my desk. I love having our AI team right near me so I can learn from what they're working on.

You can learn more about this research here: http://arxiv.org/abs/1511.06410

[He also posted a video: https://www.facebook.com/zuck/videos/10102619979032811/]

The Facebook AI Research group have submitted this paper for publication at ICLR 2016 (a conference in Puerto Rico in May). So the rumours of their developing a Go-playing program are correct!

As they say - it's not up to the best commercial programs yet, but it's probably around 4 Dan ...

Better Computer Go Player with Neural Network and Long-term Prediction.

Play it on KGS - darkforest and darkfores1.

The 5th season of this championship is about to commence and we're pleased to announce our team, captained again by Chris Bryant.

The team and the match schedule can be seen here.

Please give them your support - they'll need it since League C is more difficult than previously, with a strong team from South Africa joining for the first time.

A report on the recent EGF AGM is now available in our members area.

The Nihon Ki-in, in association with the Sasakawa Foundation, would like to invite THREE students under the age of 24, who are promising players in British Go, to visit Japan in October for some extensive Go studying and have sent us the following invitation:

1. Our SUPPORT

1) Air ticket

From Martin Stiassny, President EGF

International University Go Tournament (for students only)

Just now this tournament is running in Hongkong for the first time. About 10 seats were reserved for Europe in this completely new tournament under the lead of the Ing-Foundation. As far as I know at least 4 players from Europe are participating.

The European Go Federation is proud to announce the start of the certification of European professional Go players. This is in cooperation with CEGO, the EGF's main sponsor, and only possible thanks to their initiative and generosity.

For full details see http://www.eurogofed.org/proqualification/

This year marks the 90th anniversary of the founding of the Nihon Ki-in and they will hold the Summer Go School from 26th August 2014!

Major New Features 2014: - You will play at Japan’s most popular amateur tournament called ‘Takara Shuzou Cup’ at which over 1000 people play!