Hi, The challenge to write a go playing program that could beat a professional was issued before the wide availability of Internet Go Servers, and broadband access.
Under these new conditions, it is trivial to write such a program, provided the game takes place on a server, and at time limits chosen by the program. For example a random point playing program could choose time limits of half a second per move, sudden death. Therefore I suggest that a program's strength can (if needed) be expressed as the shortest time limits that a player of a standard strength (eg Pro. 1 dan) would be willing to play the program at, given an equal reward/loss regime (ie the chance of either winning would be 0.5). The format of time limits for such games would need to be standardised, for example - it could be decided that only limits of the type 'sudden death, x number of seconds per move' were allowed. In that case, 'x' could be used as a measure of the program's strength (as an abreviation for 'would beat a standard strength player half the time at x seconds per move') Of course the strength of a 'standard strength' Go player varies, and professional one dans would likely be unwilling to be beaten in ultra blitz games for the benefit of computer go programmers, so 'amateur 1 dan' is a realistic idea for a standard strength go player. dan _______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/
