Not much to see here. Sooner than expected, but still. AlphaGo is to Go what was DeepBlue to Chess. Hopefully, we'll see engine development speed up, hopefully we'll see engine tournaments on a (semi) professional level (like e.g. TCEC in chess).

AlphaGo is to Go what was DeepBlue to Chess.

where Deep Blue have been the end, AlphaGo is the beginning.

Not much to see here. Sooner than expected, but still. AlphaGo is to Go what was DeepBlue to Chess. Hopefully, we'll see engine development speed up, hopefully we'll see engine tournaments on a (semi) professional level (like e.g. TCEC in chess).

...hopefully we'll see better conditions for humans, e.g. 2-3 days for a game like in the old days, so that a player can really study a position or a database of 100.000 AG-self-games or at least some games before a competition.

While AlphaGo is stepping back from competitive play, it’s certainly not the end of our work with the Go community, to which we owe a huge debt of gratitude for their encouragement and motivation over the past few years.

We plan to publish one final academic paper later this year that will detail the extensive set of improvements we made to the algorithms’ efficiency and potential to be generalised across a broader set of problems. Just like our first AlphaGo paper, we hope that other developers will pick up the baton, and use these new advances to build their own set of strong Go programs.

We’re also working on a teaching tool - one of the top requests we’ve received throughout this week. The tool will show AlphaGo’s analysis of Go positions, providing an insight into how the program thinks, and hopefully giving all players and fans the opportunity to see the game through the lens of AlphaGo. We’re particularly honoured that our first collaborator in this effort will be the great Ke Jie, who has agreed to work with us on a study of his match with AlphaGo. We’re excited to hear his insights into these amazing games, and to have the chance to share some of AlphaGo’s own analysis too.
[..]
We’re now publishing a special set of 50 AlphaGo vs AlphaGo games, played at full length time controls, which we believe contain many new and interesting ideas and strategies.