Nearly a decade after AlphaGo’s games first shocked the Go world, Michael Redmond 9P and
Chris Garlock have returned to the fifty official AlphaGo-vs-AlphaGo self-play games in AlphaGo to Zero, Volume 3: Masterpieces.
(TUNE IN on this Friday, December 12 at 7PM ET as Redmond and Garlock complete their AlphaGo vs Alpha Go series with a review of Game 55 and discuss Vol. 3. Watch on the AGA’s YouTube and Twitch channels.)
In the book’s introduction, the authors describe what it was like to revisit these “mysterious” games with stronger tools, deeper knowledge, and the benefit of hindsight.
Redmond admits that when he completed the previous volume, he was “exhausted — and, to be frank, a bit negative about doing another book.” At the time, many of AlphaGo’s moves seemed inexplicable. “I kept wondering if I was missing something,” he says. “I had to invent stories to explain what was happening.”
Coming back years later, however, he describes a turning point:“It’s like when you start learning a new language — at first it’s just noise, but then, little by little, you start hearing meaning.”
The fifty games DeepMind released, Redmond notes, weren’t random samples but the curated record of the match they wanted the world to see — true “masterpieces” that professionals around the globe immediately studied and absorbed. The impact was profound: “Almost overnight, professional play jumped more than a stone in strength… It broke the rating systems.”
For Redmond himself, commenting on the games became a way of learning to “see Go in the new way,” bridging the gap between human intuition and AI’s strategic logic.
“When I first commented on these games, I was still trying to figure out who was ahead… Now I’m focusing on why the moves function, how they create balance and flow.”
Volume 3 presents these landmark games through this evolved lens — emphasizing direction, shape, timing, and the subtle endgame decisions that define modern AI Go. As Garlock writes, this is “the conversation as it finally becomes legible,” leading directly toward the next stage of the series, when AlphaGo Zero takes that language even further.
photo: Redmond and Garlock at the 2025 World Amateur Go Championships earlier this year.