Sylvain,
Were you aware of this challenge from the American Go Association? The
following is from the latest AGA newsletter; you can send corrections or
replies to [EMAIL PROTECTED]
GO ONLINE: MoGo -- No-Go, So-So or Uh-Oh?
Go has been called "The fruit fly of IT", and for a good reason --
although software engineers have created programs that can defeat the
strongest chess players, the strongest go programs are routinely
defeated by talented children. In fact, go is the lone holdout, the
only classic game that has not yet been "solved" (so to speak) for the
computer. If you wonder why, the Wikipedia article on computer go is a good
place to start.
One way to simplify the problem is to work with a smaller board, an
approach followed by Levente Kocsis and Csaba Szepesvari, who are
working together at the Hungarian Academy of Science on a 9x9 program
called MoGo. Their recent claim that MoGo plays 9x9 go "near the level
of a professional go player made international news so we decided to
investigate.
Sylvain Gelly, a contributor to the program, clarified the "one-armed
bandit strategy," a variation of the ancient Chinese proverb "Rich men
don't pick fights." Gelly told the EJ that "MoGo tries to maximize its
winning probability. When behind, MoGo will play 'strange' moves to try
to catch up, and when ahead, it will prefer safe moves which secure
victory instead of keeping score. Usually it loses points when ahead,
trading profit for safety, aiming to win by +0.5." To learn more see
the Sensei's Library MoGo page.
MoGo has played extensively
on the Internet but evidence that it plays beyond the mid-kyu level is
not compelling, so we're going to put MoGo to the test. Philip Waldron
-- a solid 6-dan with a current AGA rating of 6.47 who has reviewed go
software for the EJ -- will play a best-of-seven series against MoGo in
the computer go room on KGS. Game times will not be announced in
advance, and times will vary to eliminate the possibility of human
interference on the MoGo side. The results, and possibly a few of the
games, will appear in a future EJ, so stay tuned!
- Roy Laird
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