You can take a look at their paper... http://airesearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/deepmind-mastering-go.pdf http://airesearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/0

You can take a look at their paper... http://airesearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/deepmind-mastering-go.pdf http://airesearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/deepmind-ma... Basically, the ("lots of hardware") distributed implementation gets ~3100 points in the Elo rating against ~2900. ~2900 is still sufficient to win against Fan Hui. So I would say, that yes, this algorithm has most of the merit here.