Live baseball games used to have good ratings, but they have dropped precipitously since 2000. In 2007, live baseball largely disappeared from TV. NHK was looking for a new way to enjoy live baseball games amid a continuous decline in viewership.

We used the results from our earlier challenge to open an online platform available to any baseball fan on the day of Game 2 of the Japan Series, the championship series to determine the best baseball team in Japan. We asked them to join a contest against our AI. There have been many experiments pitting humans against AI like AlphaGo, Chess, Quiz and so on, but this was significant because it was a platform where all pro baseball fans could go up against an AI.