Aftermath

Well, THE match is now over, and we're almost back in the right time-zone, so it's time to give an interim view as to the effects on us in the UK.

Obviously our profile has risen just a little! I turned on to the BBC News on Monday towards the end and lo and behold there was an item about Go and the implications for AI, and I wasn't even surprised... If you look at our page of media mentions for the match you'll see what I mean. I haven't counted, but there must be at least 100 in the National Papers, Radio and TV. Did we appear on all channels? Well I don't think we were on Radio 3 or BBC 4...

It felt like madness at times, trying to satisfy media requests for someone to come to their studio in the next couple of hours, but thanks to Dylan Carter (BBC Radio Wales) , Jon Diamond (BBC Radio 5 Live and Radio Wales), Toby Manning (sky News), Natasha Regan (BBC Radio 4 Today), Francis Roads (BBC Radio 2 and BBC World TV) and Kyohiko Tanaka (BBC World Service) for their interviews. Also to Martin Harvey and the Cheadle Hulme School plus the Trigantius tournament for hosting Korean TV crews.

We do know is that we had to add more computing resources to our website in a hurry on the first day of the match as performance had taken a dive - not surprisingly since we were receiving almost twice the number of accesses compared to the, what we thought was big, peak just after the announcement of the Nature article in January.

Peak access to the website was actually on the fourth day of the match at over 25,000 page views. This compares to about 1,000 per day we were receiving during January. About 45% of these accesses were to our Learn to Play Go pages, so we've taught something like 80,000 people how to play the game this year!!! Unfortunately for us, only about one third of these are UK players - still 25,000 new UK players isn't too bad...

Realistically, we don't know what our new level of page views is, since it hasn't settled down yet - we've received about 8,000 today, i.e. about 2,500 new players world-wide.

Additionally, Pentangle have reported a significant upturn in their sales - they've sold dozens of the Introductory set, when they'd normally be selling the odd one. Some clubs have already reported more people turning up and we've been contacted directly by a number of people who'd like to set up clubs in new areas.

It's time for us all to build on this wave of recognition and new players for our favourite game now.