Microsoft co-founder says his exploration vessel M/Y Octopus found the battleship off the coast of the Philippines 
 
 Sunk without trace in what some historians consider the greatest naval battle ever fought, the mightiest battleship ever built has been found off the Philippines by one of the world’s wealthiest men. Allen said he had long been fascinated by second world war history and was “honoured to play a part in finding this key vessel in naval history and honouring the memory of the incredible bravery of the men who served aboard her”. “WW2 Battleship Musashi sank 1944 is FOUND,” Allen announced on Twitter, beneath a ghostly underwater photograph of the mammoth vessel’s rusting, coral-encrusted bow clearly bearing the chrysanthemum crest of the Japanese imperial family. Other pictures taken on the floor of the Sibuyan Sea by a team from the Octopus, Allen’s luxury yacht and undersea exploration vessel, showed one of the warship’s enormous anchors and a heavily encrusted valve captioned: “RIP crew of Musashi, approximately 1,023 lost.” 
 
 Image taken by Paul Allen showing what Allen’s team believes is a valve wheel on the ship. Designed to take on multiple enemy ships simultaneously, the Musashi was the second of the imperial Japanese navy’s colossal Yamato-class heavy battleships. On October 18 1944, Japanese vice admiral Takeo Kurita sailed with a 67-strong fleet, including both the Musashi and Yamato, into the Sibuyan Sea, west of the Philippine island of Leyte, aiming to throw back an American landing and attack vulnerable US transport ships on the other side of the island. A statement released by Vulcan, Allen's company, said that the team combined historical data with advanced technology to narrow the search area, and that Allen had "commissioned a hypsometric bathymetric survey of the ocean floor to determine the terrain" before searching the area with a Bluefin autonomous underwater vehicle. Allen, who co-founded Microsoft with Bill Gates in 1975 and is ranked by Forbes magazine as the 51st richest person in the world, said he began searching for the battleship more than eight years ago.
– The wreckage of Japan's biggest World War II warship has been discovered more than a half-mile underwater in the Sibuyan Sea, and credit for the find goes to a Microsoft co-founder, AFP reports. Paul Allen tweeted photos on Monday of the Musashi, sunk by US warplanes in 1944. Allen says he found the remains in the Philippines while exploring on his yacht, the M/Y Octopus, and describes it as the culmination of an eight-year search that relied on historical documents from four countries, a "hypsometric bathymetric survey" of the ocean floor, and his yacht's robust technology. After surveying the area, Allen and his team of researchers deployed an autonomous underwater vehicle to pinpoint the ship's location, according to a press release via CNBC that calls the Musashi "one of the two largest and most technologically advanced battleships in naval history." "The Musashi is truly an engineering marvel, and as an engineer at heart, I have a deep appreciation for the technology and effort that went into its construction," Allen says. Underwater photos show a giant chrysanthemum on the ship's bow, symbolizing Japan's royal family; an image of one of the ship's valves reveals it bears Japanese writing. A Japanese museum director says he's "90% sure" that it is indeed the Musashi, CNN reports. More than 1,000 people died in the ship's sinking. "It's fateful that the discovery was made on the 70th anniversary of [the end of] World War II," Kazushige Todaka adds. "It is [a] very meaningful discovery and a good chance for us to remind ourselves about the war and its tragedy." (A World War II "ghost ship" was recently found off Hawaii.)