EY could have such price if he invested more time in studying neural networks, but not in writing science fiction.
Has he ever demonstrated any ability to produce anything technically valuable?
He has ability to attract groups of people and write interesting texts. So he could attract good programmers for any task.
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.