Belgian Go Federation

In April, Belgian team (Jan, Kwinten, Nelis, Gabriel) lost heavily (0-4) like previous month, this time against Hungary.

With 2 rounds still to be played, Belgium is now 8th out of 12 teams in this B-league, having only 2 points more than the potentially descending teams !

Here are the results of the round:
http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps/rounds/293

And here the standings after this round:
http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps

Lucas Neirynck conquered his 6th title of Belgian Champion (see palmares here: http://www.gofed.be/node/260).
He remained unbeaten in the finals of the Belgian Championship.

François Gonze ended at the 2nd place.

Gabriel Mercier, Kevin Prist and Jan Ramon, ex aequo, completed a (large) podium.

These 5 players are qualified for the 2017 finals.

Thomas Connor, Nelis Vets, Vincent Quoilin and Joost V. will have to fight in the premiminaries to get a qualifying place to the finals...

PS: Wang Yue was absent (and informally replaced by Tom, a double digit kyu)

Here are the results:

1. Lucas Neirynck 9/9
2. François Gonze 7/9
3. Gabriel Mercier, Kevin Prist and Jan Ramon 6/9
6. Thomas Connor 4/9
7. Nelis Vets 4/9
8. Vincent Quoilin 2/9
9. Joost Vannieuwenhuizen 1/9
10. Tom 0/9

details: http://www.europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/Tournament_Card.php?&key=T160319T

In March, Belgian team (Kwinten, Nelis, Dominique, Gabriel) lost heavily (0-4) against a strong opponent: Poland.

Belgium is now in the middle of the "peloton" (6th out of 12 teams) in this B-league.

Here are the results of the round:
http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps/rounds/292

And here the standings after this round:
http://pandanet-igs.com/communities/euroteamchamps

So as to think about something else in this dark day...
This dynamic video shows the day-to-day evolution of the top 10 go players since 1974...

Interesting to see the emergence of China and Korea since 1990...(and sudden AlphaGo's appearance at 2nd place a few days ago)...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oRvlyEpOQ-8

This week the first match of the interclub 2016 will be played. A stunning amount of 8 clubs are participating, the highest amount in a decade.

You can find the interclub schedule and results here: http://www.gofed.be/en/tournament/interclubs

May the best club win.

DeepMind’s groundbreaking artificial intelligence (A.I.), AlphaGo, defeated Lee Sedol in the final game of the Google DeepMind Challenge Match, winning the five game match with a 4–1 score.

AlphaGo now goes down in history as the 1st computer Go program to defeat a top professional player, and was awarded an honorary professional 9 dan rank by the Korean Baduk Association (note: AG is even ranked nr 2 on http://www.goratings.org/ :-).

More info on https://gogameguru.com

PS:....among many others sites and articles...the event was largely commented !
For instance: Michael Silcher (member of the board) was interviewed on RTBF. Listen to him here: http://www.rtbf.be/radio/podcast/player?id=2091036&channel=lapremiere

Although the match is already won by AlphaGo, the remaining games are played to the full. Lee Sedol won game 4 holding white thanks to a brilliant move in a difficult middle game. This move was even qualified as "god move" by Gu Li, 9p.

This win is quite important from a symbolic point of view. It also exposes some weaknesses of AlphaGo that were invisible so far.

Game 5 will be held on Tuesday 15 March. It has been agreed that Lee Sedol will hold black.

http://www.wired.com/2016/03/go-grandmaster-lee-sedol-grabs-consolation-...

AlphaGo, the go playing software developed by Google Deepmind, has defeated Lee Sedol with three straight wins in their long awaited match!

This amazing achievement comes five months after AlphaGo won 5-0 against Fan Hui. Most of the commentators before the match predicted that AlphaGo had no chance to win against such a strong player as Lee Sedol. However, AlphaGo proved them wrong and edged Lee Sedol in every part of the first three games.

This week end, 16 top European amateurs fought to become the fifth European professional go player.

Ukranian Artem Kachanovskyi beat his countryfellow Andrei Kravets in final and join the four ex-amateurs who already qualified as pros through similar competitions in 2014 (Lisy, Jabarin) and 2015 (Shikshin, Surma).

Complete results can be found here: http://www.eurogofed.org/index.html?id=40

François Gonze, 3d won the tournament of Leuven with a perfect score. Lucas Neirynck, 5d ended 2nd (4-1); Jan Ramon, 4d completed the podium (3-2).

This edition met a big success with a total of 46 participants!

Complete results: http://www.europeangodatabase.eu/EGD/Tournament_Card.php?&key=T160220D&p...