24 hours and counting...

The AlphaGo v Lee Sedol match is now less than 24 hours away. Are you ready? Will you be getting up early? What are you planning for the weekend? Watch our status page here.

At the Press Conference in Seoul this morning, Alphabet (parent company of Google) executive chairman Eric Schmidt said “The winner here, no matter who wins, is humanity”.

Lee Sedol seemed very confident from the various Korean news items, although he's backtracked a little at this Press Conference, being quoted by the BBC as saying "Playing against a machine is very different from an actual human opponent. Normally, you can sense your opponent’s breathing, their energy. And lots of times you make decisions which are dependent on the physical reactions of the person you’re playing against. With a machine, you can’t do that.”

Demis Hassabis said “We’re many decades away from a real human AI; we’re still playing games”, but he seemed quietly confident when we met him in March...

I'm not as confident as Lee Sedol that Lee will win - I think AlphaGo will win at least two games. It's almost time to see though.

Yesterday we had a couple more UK press items, including another blog from the Nature editor who was present during the Fan Hui match and who is now in Seoul too. It looks like he'll be filing a number of other pieces filling in a bit of the background to what's actually happening there.

Today there's a request from BBC Radio 5 Live, a German journalist and a new TV channel to me: TRTworld, based in Istanbul. Follow our media coverage here.

The first game of the match starts at 4am tomorrow, although the DeepMind feed says it starts at 3:30am, presumably to show some some preliminaries. How will AlphaGo handle nigiri? I'm sure Toby as Referee of the previous match must know...

Go Game Guru will be hosting discussions during each game. Here's the link for the first game. They'll be posting updates regularly.

Anyway, please feel free to post your events, musings and comments to our Facebook page as this seems the easiest place to collect this sort of thing and also where we're pointing journalists to find out the latest details. (You'll probably have noticed that all our News items from the website are automatically fed via the RSS feed to this page.)