The Future of Go Summit in Wuzhen
The Future of Go Summit 2017 was held in Wuzhen, China, where legendary players like Kejie, one of the most famous Go players in the world, had a 3-game Go Match with DeepMind's AlphaGo . Some of the interesting highlights of the event included two unique games where two world-famous Go players were battling with AlphaGo at the same time. Another game showcased an amazing warfare between a team of Go Players and AlphaGo.
Challenges
China is known to have the world's most (in)famous internet wall. What with AlphaGo 2017 being a 5-day event held in Wuzhen, China meant that the historical event would be censored to viewers outside of China. Some media outlets and livestreaming services became creative and found a way to livestream it to the outside world (e.g., bilibili.com).
Solution
To keep the rest of the world captivated with the event highlights, we created real-time posts on outstanding moves, results and interesting factoids. All of which were shared in real-time via Google Deepmind's official page, Deepmind's founder Demis Hasabis' personal Twitter account and Google's official Twitter page. The posts were then shared with the Go players, Google's official account and journalists who were interested to populate the news. All posts were created in English and Chinese.
Content include:
1. Go players' ranking and their 'super powers'.
2. GIF posts on the different types of AlphaGo game - Kejie vs AlphaGo, Pair Go, and Team Go.
3. Interesting game play posts during real-time moments.
4. Famous historical game moves.
5. Fresh results after each game.
Results
1800+ attendees including 178 Chinese press, 65 international press, Go fans, University A.I. experts, top business partners, VIP guests and our co-host's esteemed guests gathered in Wuzhen with another 740K unique viewers (from 207 countries including U.S., Hong Kong, Taiwan etc.) tuned-in to YouTube to witnessed many firsts in A.I./AlphaGo history. Despite numerous hurdles, interest in accessing event info remained high with 262K unique views to the Event Site worldwide, and the announcement generated 16,800+ pieces of coverage* and 426 minutes of broadcast in China and over 300 minutes of broadcast overseas including Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and other U.S. and Europe-based publications.
Learnings
1. Working on real-time posting was intense.
2. Being on location creating all these quick update posts really helps.
3. Working with so many restriction and finding quick solutions for every road block.
4. We came up with a mobile game idea to engage with fans during real-time game but due to the tight timeline, we didn't manage to create the game.
How to improve
Google managed to make this awesome historical event happen within a couple of months. But seeing how immense this event is and if time were on our side, we would have liked to create more pre-buzz with videos and social activation so that it would excite more than Go fanatics.