The developers probably use whatever window manager they want. I'm personally a fan of i3 also.

But there is nothing wrong with keeping the frontend machine used in this Go match in default Ubuntu desktop environment since its only purpose is to play Go with a graphical user interface anyway.

I know. I was half-joking.

Also given the progress of DeepMind so far, it's very likely that whatever desktop setups they have, is working very well for them.

Probably Goobuntu. ;-)

Probably not, as they are not sitting on a corp workstation on the corp network :)

They could be remoted into one?