2020 World GO AI Championship Pre Semi-Finals Results

Overview

20 GO Artificial Intelligence teams competed from Sep. 26th to Sep. 29th during the Pre Semi-Finals in Fuzhou, China. Eight moved on to the Semi-Finals, which will be held from Nov. 30th to Dec. 4.

Results

Throughout 70 total games over the course of three days, in seven rounds, eight moved on to the Semi Finals. You can see the winners and the Semi Finals bracket below.

How did the key AI's perform?

There were surprises, upsets, and a little confusion during the tournament. Unfortunately, there were a total of 24 games which ended by timeout and no one was able to see how the game actually would have unfolded. As far as we know, the timeouts were caused by technical difficulties of the event host.

#1: MyrtleGo

MyrtleGo won almost every single game they played, even against the impressive ChaoRanGo. Their only loss was against Golaxy in Round 3. MyrtleGo is a relatively new contender who came in very strong.

#2: ChaoRanGo

The Chinese AI ChaoRanGo is a closed source two time GO AI Champion, having defeated hundreds of AI teams in Oct. 2019. Given the reputation, it was expected that ChaoRanGo would be a strong contender and only lost one game against MyrtleGo.

#3: Golaxy

Golaxy is a closed source, commercially available product which gives users the ability to purchase use of the Golaxy AI. Golaxy came out weak in the first round, losing against the open source AI Leela Zero, however recovered by being the only AI to defeat MyrtleGo throughout the entire tournament! Some would say that Golaxy has the most to lose because they have many customers who rely on Golaxy to be a strong AI product.

#4: Tian Go

Tian Go is another Chinese AI which performed well by beating DolBaram in Round 7, but lost to Yixiaotian who did not even make it to the Semi Finals.

#5: YiLeGo

YiLeGo lost 3 games total, but won one against LeelaZero. Since LeelaZero beat Golaxy, this suggests that YiLeGo may have some extra fight in them we will see in the Semi Finals.

#6: DolBaram

DolBaram also performed fairly well by defeating both LeelaZero and KataGo. Some are surprised that DolBaram made it to the Semi Finals because previously they have not performed nearly as well.

#7: LeelaZero

LeelaZero came out strong, winning their first game against the closed-source commercially developed GO AI, Golaxy. This was a surprising because LeelaZero is an open source AI which did not appear to be actively developed coming into the tournament. This defeat was quite an upset for Golaxy!

LeelaZero then went on to win 4 out 7 games and all games lost were lost by timing out.

#8: izisgo

izisgo lost against LeelaZero, however won against Yixiaotian. Yixiaotian was expected to perform stronger because it is developed by a leading GO company in China.

Where are AlphaGoZero and Fineart??

Neither AlphaGoZero nor Fineart entered into the 2020 GO AI World Championship, thereby forfeiting the possibility to win the 2020 title. It appears that since these are AI's developed by large companies (Google's Deepmind and Tencent), that they have chosen to dedicate their resources towards corporate goals, rather than winning a small amount of money and being able to show off their title. However, there's always a possibility that they will show up and surprise us next year!

What is the prize for winning the 2020 GO AI Championship?

The First Place Prize is $17,000, Second Place is $10,000, Third Place is $7,000, Fourth Place is $3,000 and Fifth place is $1,500.

Conclusions

We were all disappointed by so many the timed out games, because we will never know the true results... Nonetheless, the show must go on! So, we will continue to cover the tournament into December and keep track of the latest updates.

The next and final rounds will be from Nov. 29th to Dec 4th. By signing up here, you will receive all the updates from Game of Go about the 2020 GO AI Championship.