Alpha Go seems to play really bad moves when it is loosing - this makes some sense as humans also make overplays out of desperation, but it suggests that Alpha Go would be bad at handicap games, unless they change the algorithum to maximise score instead of win probability.
Nothing "bad" about desperate overplays while losing from Alpha Go's perspective. In the same way that it doesn't care about winning by more than a half point, it doesn't mind making its loss more crushing. Invade every territory. If it doesn't work, you lose by a bit more. Boo hoo. If it works, you might winl
I'm very interested in the fact that they coded a "resign" function into it. I wouldn't have expected that.
There have been a couple of brief discussions of this in the Open Thread, but it seems likely to generate more so here's a place for it.
The original paper in Nature about AlphaGo.
Google Asia Pacific blog, where results will be posted. DeepMind's YouTube channel, where the games are being live-streamed.
Discussion on Hacker News after AlphaGo's win of the first game.