Oh man overblown article.<p>Fan Hui is 2p, so very skilled, but the ranking system goes up to 9p. To give a sense of how large a gap that is, there is and has only ever been one Westerner to achieve that rank, Michael Redmond. The article states they plan to face off against Lee Sedol 9p, and if they beat him in a no-handicap game, <i>that</i> will be as impressive as Deep Blue against Kasparov.<p>You&#x27;ll want to watch this year&#x27;s Computer Go UEC Cup[0] in March, with Zen and CrazyStone being the typical victors. (CrazyStone in particular has sustained a 6d rating on KGS, a popular Go server, but lately has been at 5d. In the past it has beaten a 9p with a 4 stone handicap, which is impressive, but that handicap is huge and it hasn&#x27;t yet won with 3 stones.) Of interest this year is that Facebook is competing, and AFAIK they seem to take a similar approach as Google by training the AI using deep learning techniques and then strengthening it further with MCTS. In their public disclosures they claim to beat Pachi pretty often, which puts their bot around 4d-6d, it&#x27;ll be interesting to see how it fairs against Zen and CrazyStone in the Cup and if it wins against a 9p.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsb.cs.uec.ac.jp&#x2F;~igo&#x2F;eng&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;jsb.cs.uec.ac.jp&#x2F;~igo&#x2F;eng&#x2F;</a>