 Combined with the "yaneura ou" () search, Elmo became the champion of the 27th annual World Computer Shogi Championship () in May 2017.However, in the Den Ō tournament () in November 2017, Elmo was not able to make it to the top five engines losing to (1st), shotgun (2nd), ponanza (3rd), (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.