Combined with the yaneura ou (やねうら王) search, Elmo became the champion of the 27th annual World Computer Shogi Championship (世界コンピュータ将棋選手権) in May 2017.
[1][2] However, in the Den Ō tournament (将棋電王戦) in November 2017, Elmo was not able to make it to the top five engines losing to 平成将棋合戦ぽんぽこ (1st), shotgun (2nd), ponanza (3rd), 読み太 (4th), and Qhapaq_conflated (5th).
In October 2017, DeepMind claimed that its program AlphaZero, after two hours of massively parallel training (700,000 steps or 10,300,000 games), began to exceed Elmo's performance.
With a full nine hours of training (24 million games), AlphaZero defeated Elmo in a 100-game match, winning 90, losing 8, and drawing two.
Subsequently, the castle has been used by professional shogi players and recently featured in a book on a new Anti–Ranging Rook Rapid Attack strategy.