Apparently I also post this news on reddit and someone generously translated it
The developer of Zen approached Dwango for support. Zen is a personal project and he does not have resources to develop deep learning, and also needs server hardware.
Dwango happily agreed to help. Assigning their deep learning expert to the team.
Also supporting the team is a deep learning research team at Tokyo University and the developer of Ponanza (A shogi AI that beat all the human pros)
Japanese Go Association is also pledging their support.
Their goal is to beat AlphaGo in 6 months to 1 year.
Currently AlphaGo has better pattern recognition but Zen has better simulation and clustering. So if Zen can catch up on pattern recognition and get access to the same hardware, Zen should be stronger.
They estimate AlphaGo to be 500 elo stronger than Zen. They don't think it will be difficult to gain 400 Elo from better pattern recognition and 200 from other modifications.
Also, in other news, Crazy Stone developer Remi Coulom is also working very hard on his own deep learning version of Crazy Stone, he already spend a lot on new hardware, mostly GPU. He's quite happy with the progress result and learning the new thing like programming with GPU. He doesn't expect his program to catch up with AlphaGo since he estimated the hardware of AlphaGo to be one million dollar which he's obviously cannot afford (IMHO without a big sponsor like DeepZenGo) He also said that the actual cost of AlphaGo project might be a lot higher than that since the Nature paper only show the method that works, that mean there's a hundred of methods that Deepmind try that didn't work, that will cost a lot of money too.
(src
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kvf6C3kjEkc )
So I think we can expect a lot of 7D+ program to come out later this year. It won't affect much to us since they're already stronger than us, but Pro will most likely benefit the most from this since they can use this as tool or training partner or toy in someway.
