Taking your question at face value (why don't they?): Because right now, so far as I can tell, Google is so far ahead that there would be little interest in the contest.

Perhaps Facebook will start to catch up, or Microsoft will suddenly appear with something startling, but for the moment the only real competition for AlphaGo comes from top human players. (Perhaps not even them? I don't think anyone really knows.)

> Google is so far ahead that there would be little interest in the contest.

Sounds like EXACTLY the motivation a contest would help to foster.

I think he's saying that, right now, both other companies would expect to be crushed in such a competition, so why would they not spare themselves the embarrassment?

And because we're doing silly memes, to accept the challenge, Microsoft and Facebook would probably have to go into the competition with this kind of attitude: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ZYg4ZbcOPQ

Go has a few interesting properties that make it an appealing target for AI researchers (perfect information, no randomness, an abundance of highly-trained human players to benchmark against), but if you were trying to devise an AI-vs-AI tournament you would probably concoct a more difficult challenge (or use one of the human games that AIs still have problems with, like no-limit Texas Hold'em, or the board game Diplomacy).

There is already a computer NL hold'em tournament out there, which can be found here, http://www.computerpokercompetition.org

I thought about that too. But then I realized that Google are better than anyone else at this for now.

I think the expectation is that they move on to the next challenging problem eventually.

It would still be interesting if they only did it in the short term, say 2-3 years.

Would those companies have any interest in publishing all their research if it gets to the point where it actually means something winning this tournament?

Sure why not? There isn't any competitive advantage in the AI model for beating this game – there's probably tangential knowledge and experience gained.

Maybe someone can clarify but it doesn't seem like hoarding this model (specific to playing Go) would help Google have an advantage in their search algorithms over Facebook, for example.

If they did, they should allow humans and limit the amount of energy used during the matches, like calories in a tuna sandwich.

Thats such a cool idea! OMFG