The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can’t Win

http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go/

by relampago • 12 years ago

322 177 12 years ago

ronaldx3• 12 years ago

One additional issue for computers is that humans don't play the game tree out to its conclusion - humans recognise winning and losing positions rather than playing a much longer (perhaps infinite) prove-out game.

A naive game theory strategy runs into a disasterous problem - the game tree is extensively longer than the 200 moves that a human will play.

So, a computer has to recognise a winning position, in a heuristic way, as well as the best players do. But, even as a total beginner, it's easy to notice Go programs sometimes get the end-of-game scoring totally wrong.

Once you've overcome this first problem, you've reduced Go to "just" a 200-move game tree.

hyperpape11• 12 years ago

I don't know what you're trying to say. Monte Carlo based programs play out entire games, and evaluate them by scoring the end of the game--no heuristics needed for the evaluation, only for the playouts. And yes, they can accurately score a completed game.

asolove• 12 years ago

I think the above is trying to say that the percentage of total possible trees that a human would bother considering is much lower in Go than most games, like chess. So the computational resources needed to do Monte Carlo and get results competitive with human players are much greater.

But the poster is wrong in saying that this means computers need to use heuristics. Indeed, the recent breakthroughs in Go-playing programs come from removing heuristics that previously helped the programs prune the tree space and instead just using Monte Carlo to simulate all possibilities.

ronaldx3• 12 years ago

I'm trying to express why Go is a difficult problem to solve.

I'm saying this (scoring, play-out) has been a difficult problem, which was not solved even a small number of years ago, and is still not considered straightforward. Even if it is solved correctly now, that's only a start.

I would also note that Monte Carlo is by definition a heuristic method - it is statistical and not guaranteed to be optimal.

rdtsc• 12 years ago

Monte Carlo based programs play out entire games

Would that be pretty much impossible with Go on current hardware and software?

ama729• 12 years ago

humans recognise winning and losing positions rather than playing a much longer (perhaps infinite) prove-out game.

If true, does it mean a computer (or an Human) could win by just not conceding?

DupDetector• 12 years ago

No.

"Conceding" means passing. If you don't pass, you have to play. If you play when the game is effectively over, you either play in your opponent's territory and get captured, or your own, which reduces your score. If you play in your own territory enough then you can actually end up losing your eyes, and then be captured.

guizzy• 12 years ago

A computer would only win by playing out pre-proved positions (joseki) against an amateur who has studied them positions without understanding them.

As for infinite games, they don't really happen much; in rulesets that make it possible for them to happen, the game is usually called "no result", and this has happened only very few times in hundreds of thousands of recorded games. Modern rulesets have "patched out" this by implementing superko or similar rules: playing a stone that would put the board in a state it was in previously (positions of the stones and which player's turn it is) is an illegal move.

tinco• 12 years ago

No, a game is only over when both sides concede, and players concede when they recognize that any move they could make either does not change the score or would cost them a point (playing in territory that is already yours effectively reduces your territory as only empty territories are counted as points (in standard japanese rules)).

If one player would never concede you would keep playing until the board is full except for the unfillable eyes of the player that wins. Obviously that would take a long time and many negative moves of the losing player.

So you stop playing when both players are confident the game is over and agree on who has won.

OscarCunningham• 12 years ago

Elwyn Berlekamp, the first to study mathematical Go, says that 'What are the rules? is 'a dangerous question' (video: http://www.msri.org/realvideo/ln/msri/2000/gametheory/berlek..., start at 6:30).

For each of the (several) traditional rulesets there are positions that the ruleset can't deal with. So in order to allow a mathematical or computer analysis the rules often need to be tweaked.

hyperpape11• 12 years ago

One falsehood in the article is that Go is the only game where computers "don't stand a chance."

In fact, computers are substantially worse than the best humans at Go, Arimaa, Hex and maybe Havannah [1], to take some games that I know.

Arimaa is underexplored for both humans and computers, but there are several programmers working on it, and there is a modest prize available. Hex and Havannah are less explored, but they also have academic work done on them, and their human communities are also small, which means that we're not getting the best humans can do.

[1] Havannah has a pretty good bot, Castro, but I think it's still quite beatable.

rockdoe10• 12 years ago

One of these games was designed to be hard for computers, the others are way less popular than go and have far less history, and hence competition/interest.

It's an exaggeration but a pretty minor one.

hyperpape11• 12 years ago

Yes, but as I pointed out, there's also less human interest in those games. That affects both humans and computers. No one is a grandmaster at Arimaa, Hex or Havannah. If those games were more popular, then both computers and professionals would be better.

As far as the quality of the exaggeration, I think it is misleading. Shogi programs are just catching the best humans in 2013-2014. Go may not resist artificial intelligence for another ten years. That's a noticeable difference, but also not that grand of one. I'd just like a little accuracy: we may not be dealing with more than moderate differences in difficulty.

VLM• 12 years ago

From the article a criteria often missed in the discussion is "...of all the world’s perfect information games..."

Virtually all tabletop grognard games are perfect information games. I say virtually because there might be one I can't think of at this time, maybe a card driven game. I suppose the COIN series is partially imperfect information... Even a noob player can crush an AI trying to play grognard games so usually the computer cheats or is given a massive handicap, like, say, your human controlled division is up against two, maybe three AI divisions. I've played a lot of grognard games both computer and tabletop and I've never found a worthy evenly matched AI opponent although humans can kick my butt. Some computer implementations implement a fog of war which would certainly be imperfect information, but not tabletops or faithful reimplementations of tabletops. A "good" grognard scenario/game doesn't depend on FoW anyway, or at least many people share that belief.

You can model a stereotypical grognard game as "chess with a large hex board, more pieces, and wider variety of pieces". I guess that gives some idea what a computer-proof abstract game would look like. "GO" on a 171x171 grid, perhaps, or chess with 50 kinds of pieces.

icegreentea• 12 years ago

I'm not sure what exactly a grognard game is - but if it's just wargames, off the top of my head Stratego is a game without perfect information. A lot of fun too. The traditional board version takes three participants to play, but computer/electronic versions gets ride of the referee.

gwern2• 12 years ago

Even a noob player can crush an AI trying to play grognard games so usually the computer cheats or is given a massive handicap, like, say, your human controlled division is up against two, maybe three AI divisions. I've played a lot of grognard games both computer and tabletop and I've never found a worthy evenly matched AI opponent although humans can kick my butt.

How hard have people tried? I've never had the impression that tabletop wargames had a lot (or any...) programming/AI talent working on them. Too many, too unpopular.

hibikir• 12 years ago

You must have a very restrictive definition of grognard games. There are hundreds of wargames out there that would not qualify as perfect information. For instance, anything made by Columbia Games.

If you study them mathematically, many of those games are actually quite a bit simpler than chess or go, because despite the large number of pieces, turn limits, order limits and very limited setup options will shrink the decision space in a major way.

Those games are also easier to solve because, often to provide a light semblance to how history actually turned out, the rules are set up so that entire avenues of approach are restricted.

So why are AIs worse? because when you make a videogame, getting the hardest AI possible is not really a selling point. We worry instead about not taking too much time, or, in case of a mobile game, not eating the processor alive. Those limits make entire sets of approaches to AI unworkable altogether. If a machine was allowed to think as long as the human does, and we had a reason to actually built said AI, you'd see humans losing a whole lot in wargames. You'd get a similar thing in Euros too, as entire avenues of playing just go away because they are mathematically inferior.

clusterfoo• 12 years ago

Heh, my first thought reading the article was designing a game that is simple, yet inherently difficult for an AI player. Thanks for introducing me to Arimaa!

hyperpape11• 12 years ago

It's quite chesslike, and not really my taste, but it's a good game.

SilasX2• 12 years ago

Depending on your definition of "game", there's also captchas.

dllthomas4• 12 years ago

... and Spin The Bottle!

coldcode• 12 years ago

The problem is inherently parallel but not obviously what each task should be doing. The experienced brain clearly can see the whole board and recognize what to do next but a computer can't right now.

If I had more time this would be a lot of fun to work on. My approach would be to find some way to evolve a Go player. People clearly learn over time by playing a lot, which is basically programming their brain to recognize state and options.

nabla9• 12 years ago

Go is very complex.

How about game with much smaller search tree complexity first, like poker.

We don't have computers winning professional poker players yet. They are quite good in heads up game (one to one), but full table is beyond them. The problem in poker is not the complexity of the game, it's in learning how your opponent thinks and how they adjust to your play.

rockdoe10• 12 years ago

Poker is not a game of perfect information.

hyperpape11• 12 years ago

While it's not perfect information, it's been studied quite a bit, and heads up play is getting very good for some games. Not sure if that's limit, no-limit or what.

gabemart• 12 years ago

How about game with much smaller search tree complexity first, like poker.

I presume you're talking about limit poker. In pot-limit or no-limit poker, the search tree is large, especially (as you say) for 6-max or full-ring. I don't have much of a frame of reference, but I'm tempted to say "very large".

The problem in poker is not the complexity of the game, it's in learning how your opponent thinks and how they adjust to your play.

I don't understand this distinction. It seems to me that learning how your opponent thinks and how they adjust to your play are a central part of the difficulty in most deep games of strategy.

aninhumer2• 12 years ago

It seems to me that learning how your opponent thinks and how they adjust to your play are a central part of the difficulty in most deep games of strategy.

For human players perhaps, but my impression is that most Chess playing software simply tries to find the strongest move, without considering the opponent to any great extent.

The opposite extreme here is Rock Paper Scissors AI, where there is evidently no strongest move, and the only way to do better than a draw is to identify the opponent's strategy.

dlecorfec2• 12 years ago

Damn game, because of it we are forced to use "golang" in search engines.

thaumasiotes• 12 years ago

Right, because "go" doesn't occur outside of the context of the game or the language...

dlecorfec2• 12 years ago

woosh.

raverbashing2• 12 years ago

Darn those who call their languages something ungoogleable by itself (yes R I'm talking about you)

Anything bigger than 2 letters and having a name that's not a (very) common word should be fine.

dvirsky• 12 years ago

the golang alias works pretty well, but until you learn this trick it's annoying as hell.

datashaman2• 12 years ago

https://www.google.com/#q=R

R you sure about that?

conanbatt3• 12 years ago

Go has beat the go lang for a few thousand years. Blame google.

civilian2• 12 years ago

Go has been around for thousands of years--- Golang will be dead and gone soon enough (in a decade or two?) and we won't have that nasty keyword collision.

However, english-speaking go players are adapting to this problem. Go is the japanese name for the game--- and we're starting to google for "baduk", the korean name for the game, instead.

mickeyp• 12 years ago

I've always wondered if it's possible to inductively teach a computer to play Go using some form of machine learning by playing tens of thousands of games; perhaps games with annotations by humans following a simple format to guide the fledgling AI: "Good move", "Bad move", etc.

I used to play Go but stopped a long time ago. It was a game where you had to train your brain to recognise patterns and act on them.

rockdoe10• 12 years ago

It depends on what you consider "teach to play Go". Priming the pattern databases using existing games is a pretty typical strategy.

itry2• 12 years ago

"teach a computer to play Go using some form of machine learning"

It would work. Even unsupervised. Let random programs play against each other. Let the losers die and the winners breed offsprings with mutations. If you let that run long enough, i tend to think that the new world champion would arise with certainty.

The question is how long "long enough" is. Probably "too long" on current hardware.

Would be nice to let this experiment run and draw a graph showing the elo of the best program over time.

sp3322• 12 years ago

Random? Like code with random logic statements? Random for-loops, and random data structures initialized with random values, and random exit codes?

toby• 12 years ago

For a game this complex the evolution will be so slow you'll likely never see any progress. My experience with genetic programs is they'll go through hundreds of thousands of generations just to play tic-tac-toe properly.

hyperpape11• 12 years ago

Some people have tried: http://senseis.xmp.net/?GeneticProgrammingAndGo. See also: http://senseis.xmp.net/?ComputerGoProgramming, with relatively bad results.

louisdorard• 12 years ago

Monte Carlo Tree Search uses Machine Learning indeed! The balance between exploration and exploitation of the game tree is achieved using "bandit" algorithms (a type of Reinforcement Learning algorithm). I recommend reading (Kocsis & Szepesvari, 2006): http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.102....

kylebrown• 12 years ago

I've been experimenting with exactly this, in an effort to create a trading bot (with an eye on bitcoin/crypto-currencies, in particular). Starting from a lesser-known python library and example that solves the cart-pole task, I managed to apply it to create a pretty neat inventory balancer. Anyone curious about it should email me (email in profile).

gwern2• 12 years ago

I think a better overview these days is "A Survey of Monte Carlo Tree Search Methods", Browne et al 2012 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.297....

rockdoe10• 12 years ago

This is one of the best mainstream articles on the subject I have ever seen.

mark_l_watson2• 12 years ago

That was a good read!

I wrote a Go playing program ("Honinbo Warrior") in UCSD Pascal on my Apple II in the late 1970s. I made some money selling it commercially, but it was mostly a hobby.

Also in the 1970s, I had the privilege of playing the women's world champion and also the national champion of South Korea. They both gave me huge handicaps, and still easily beat me - I am not a very strong player. Go really is a great game.

I bought Crazy Stone for my droid phone, and it really is a fine program.

thangalin• 12 years ago

A paper written by Albert Zorbist contains a Go record of the very first human-computer Go game.

http://www.computer.org/csdl/proceedings/afips/1969/5073/00/...

The transcribed game record is at:

http://eidogo.com/#3BfnBvgMz

I have asked Albert if he can find the old ALGOL code, as it is of some historical value. The code might be stored on tape, which can be read by Scotch brand IBM tape drives (http://3480-3590-data-conversion.com/). He's going to look for his old dissertation, as well, to see if the listing was included. Otherwise, the tapes will be mailed for a data dump.

mark_l_watson2• 12 years ago

Reading Zorbist's paper on computer Go sparked my interest in Go playing programs. It would be great to have his old code, papers, etc. on something like github for a historical record.

ogig• 12 years ago

Tangential curiosity I didn't knew,

The first chess programs were written in the early fifties, one by Turing himself

When readed that I wondered in what computer could possibly that chess program ran. The amazing answer is: nowhere. Turing executed himself the orders of the program he wrote acting as cpu.

http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Alan+Turing#Chess%20a...

fduran• 12 years ago

A chess-playing computer had been suggested as early as 1864, and the first machine able to carry out a "program" was invented in Spain in 1914 by the engineer Leonardo Torres-Quevedo and called Ajedrecista http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Ajedrecista

jfoutz• 12 years ago

Site in general is NSFW, this specific comic has some swearing.

Disclamer aside, I always thought this was a pretty hilarious alternative to real automation, in the spirit of the xkcd security wrench.

http://media.oglaf.com/comic/theautomaton.jpg

mark_h• 12 years ago

Kasparov played a game against that program too, for the Turing centenary celebrations: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrxdWkjmhKg

btbuildem• 12 years ago

Caught between atheism and a crippling fear of death, Ray Kurzweil and other futurists feed this mischaracterization by trumpeting the impending technological apotheosis of humanity, their breathless idiocy echoing through popular media.

An unexpected jab in the second-last paragraph, seems the author has some strong opinions about AI. I wonder how he'd respond to Hawking's recently newsworthy worries.

agibsonccc2• 12 years ago

FWIW, it's meant for people not necessarily in the AI field, but here's a general post on it[1]. (disclaimer I'm the author).

A lot of people have strong feelings about where cognizant AI could be, I don't think fearmongering is the problem we should be focusing on.

I think it should be more focused on the problem solving potential of these systems and how they will become more relevant as computers get better.

[1] https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140506213247-1...

com2kid2• 12 years ago

Caught between atheism and a crippling fear of death

So is that line really necessary? It seems to do not but make assertions about the motives and beliefs of others, and to do such in a negative light. It adds no value to the article, but creates a negative impression in the reader's mind without giving any evidence as backing.

DanAndersen• 12 years ago

Yeah, that felt like a weird and very out-of-place insult. I also thought this was an odd assertion:

In fact, computers can’t “win” at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat, a programming challenge that makes Go look like tic-tac-toe.

It seems like when it comes to AI advances, there's always a shifting of goalposts as soon as an AI is able to do a task that was once thought to be a defining characteristic of human cognition. Why does it matter if a computer "feels good or bad" at the outcome of a competition for that competition to be somehow valid?

stingraycharles• 12 years ago

Yeah exactly. If anything, I would like to avoid emotions in AI, since emotions makes for an unpredictable outcome. That is the last thing you want in an AI, imho.

bpyne2• 12 years ago

I'm unsure sometimes if the AI moniker isn't misleading people as to what is really happening. We (human beings) aren't creating an artificial intelligence. We are learning about our own intelligence and then trying to put instructions to a machine so it can process them and simulate our intelligence. Beating Kasparov wasn't the result of powering up a machine and letting it learn on its own: on its own it would just sit there with a light on indicating power is passing through the on/off switch. People spent perhaps thousands of hours studying how chess experts approached the game and developed algorithms from it. I think of what they did as not so much artificial intelligence as collective intelligence in which the computer was just a medium.

baddox3• 12 years ago

It also seems like this author isn't aware of even the most basic concepts in the philosophy of mind, like the philosophical zombie problem, which deals precisely with the idea that the outward expression of emotions seems to be indistinguishable from "actually" experiencing emotions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_zombie

wwweston• 12 years ago

It seems like when it comes to AI advances, there's always a shifting of goalposts as soon as an AI is able to do a task that was once thought to be a defining characteristic of human cognition.

Usually it's because people all over the discussion fail to correctly distinguish between generally adaptive intelligence and specifically engineered "intelligence" (tool that appears to perform a task intelligently), and also between conscious and unaware mechanical intelligence.

A Go or Chess program isn't a goalpost for generally adaptive intelligence, it's a milestone for specifically engineered intelligence. And it isn't conscious, which is the writer's point, though the expression is imprecise enough it could be misunderstood as criticizing the more specific form.

amasad• 12 years ago

Wired magazine has always been anti-strong-AI. One of their founding editors, Kevin Kelly, has written a lot about the critique of strong AI and the singularity as Kurzweil describe it

htns• 12 years ago

I don't know Kurzweil's real position, but I believe in one of his books he expected singularity by 2045. A lot of people don't protest the idea itself, but the optimistic schedule.

stcredzero5• 12 years ago

If there will be hyper intelligent AI worthy of the name, we won't realize the singularity has happened at all.

Reedx• 12 years ago

Yep, Kurzweil was actually just interviewed by CNN (on their new show Inside Man) about singularity and that's still around the time he predicts it'll happen.

bayesianhorse• 12 years ago

Sounds like a bible-thumper insulting a futurist.

squidbot• 12 years ago

I noticed that the author is an "assistant professor of philosophy and religion." When I ran across this part of the article, I couldn't help but think of the philosophers bursting in on Deep Thought in HHGTTG:

"You just let the machines get on with the adding up," warned Majikthise, "and we'll take care of the eternal verities thank you very much. You want to check your legal position you do mate. Under law the Quest for Ultimate Truth is quite clearly the inalienable prerogative of your working thinkers. Any bloody machine goes and actually finds it and we're straight out of a job aren't we? I mean what's the use of our sitting up half the night arguing that there may or may not be a God if this machine only goes and gives us his bleeding phone number the next morning?"

"That's right!" shouted Vroomfondel, "we demand rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty!"

thewarrior• 12 years ago

This only deepens the mystery of humans are able to do it. I really hope I live long enough to learn how human intelligence works.

hasenj• 12 years ago

Keep in mind it's only the "Top" professional players who have spent hours every day for several years studying the game.

The best "Bot" when I last checked was 5dan level; at this level it can probably beat > 90% of human go players? (I don't actually stats ..)

matthewwiese• 12 years ago

Loving the article so far, interesting read and makes me interested in reading more into the AI Go scene. Any HNers have links that would an excited learner make?

also

computer game theory genius Alfred Zobrist

I couldn't help but laugh, because I read this an entirely different way than the author intended. I assume he just meant 'game theory' without the computer prefix

alasarmas• 12 years ago

I see on the Wikipedia article for Zobrist hashing[1] there is a reference to Albert Zobrist, who doesn't appear to have a Wikipedia page, but has pages at [2] and [3].

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zobrist_hashing

2. http://chessprogramming.wikispaces.com/Albert%20Zobrist

3. http://senseis.xmp.net/?AlbertLZobrist

michaelochurch• 12 years ago

Caught between atheism and a crippling fear of death, Ray Kurzweil and other futurists feed this mischaracterization by trumpeting the impending technological apotheosis of humanity, their breathless idiocy echoing through popular media.

Wat. Why was this bit of out-of-place and mostly off-topic divisiveness dropped into an article about Go?

I don't expect "the Singularity" to come in my lifetime, although smaller victories in "AI" have already proven themselves very useful; but let's leave God out of AI debates. Whether there exists a God or gods (all "atheism" means is not believing in gods, and nothing either way about life after death), whether there is life after death, and what AI can do are orthogonal matters. The one that we can do something about, is the last of these.

For me, I'm a huge fan of AI and would love to see more research in that vein, but I don't dread or fear my eventual death. I don't intend to bring death on prematurely, but my curiosity has me looking forward to it. I certainly don't expect to see a "Singularity" by 2045. That said, if I could program a computer to (say) cure cancer, or extend the human lifespan, I would do it in a heartbeat.

The stereotype that all AI researchers are "atheists" (as if that were a negative, or even a meaningful category) driven by a "fear of death" is (a) untrue, and (b) irrelevant. The great thing about science is that it doesn't matter what your religious beliefs are, and it seems to work regardless of whether gods exist.

nova• 12 years ago

"Death is bad," said Harry, discarding wisdom for the sake of clear communication. "Very bad. Extremely bad. Being scared of death is like being scared of a great big monster with poisonous fangs. It actually makes a great deal of sense, and does not, in fact, indicate that you have a psychological problem." -- HJPEV

trendoid• 12 years ago

Not sure why he put atheism bit but considering how many pills Ray Kurzweil takes per day(200?) to increase his age by keeping himself young, it wont be surprising if he has a genuine fear of death.

Some of his claims are quite ridiculous and PZ has done a good job of pointing out why so :

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2010/08/21/kurzweil- still-doesnt-understa/

shmageggy• 12 years ago

Does anyone have a link to more information about the percolated fractal and how it relates to Go positions? A quick googling wasn't satisfying.

ivanca• 12 years ago

In fact, computers can’t “win” at anything, not until they can experience real joy in victory and sadness in defeat

Nothing farther from the truth, there are emotion-less people (alexithymia), and that doesn't mean that they can't win or lose.

conanbatt3• 12 years ago

First of all, let me share that what Remi achieved with bots is incredible for Go players. When I was 16, the best bots out there were 6kyu, 5 ranks below the median rank for Go players.

Now, CrazyStone and Zen achieved 5d consistently on Go Servers, thats 5 ranks above the median. I have played Zen once, and I was utterly impressed by the quality of its play.

However, my game with the bot confirmed to me how bots WILL NOT beat professionals in a LONG LONG time. The bot excelled at tactical situations, and endgame. Maybe almost professional level. But the strategy is so weak, that the game turns into taking advantage in the first stage of the game, and then not losing it in the rest of it.

Until the computational power is strong enough to develop new openings, computers will always lag behind professionals in Go.

sanxiyn• 12 years ago

I don't agree with this. You can handle openings by using a pre-computed book.

If you think about it, this is actually how humans handle openings. There is an opening theory, to which huge amount of analysis(pre-computation) was done. Even professionals don't do impromptu opening analysis over the board.

On the other hand, in my opinion computer tactics are nowhere close to professional level. Not even close.

hyperpape11• 12 years ago

Openings can't be handled by a pre-computed book. What we humans call the opening can be 40 moves, and professional games often feature unique moves within the first 10-20 moves.

The situation with regard to the opening is quite different from chess.

cynicalkane• 12 years ago

Of the corner opening patterns alone (called joseki), there are 10000s of them, and it's very common to use novel ones. Many joseki, like the well known 4-4/3-3 invasion, can range from great plays to disasters depending on board position. And there are four corners.

conanbatt3• 12 years ago

The approach of trying to repeat the human process for pattern recognition is probably the main reason why bots were so weak until it was decided by a few computer scientists that Go should also be battled with brute force.

In one of the Zen vs Takemiya(?) or other professional games, the bot manages to kill a group by the professional with razor-sharp precision, including several tesujis. They excel at local tactical situations, and in terms of killing groups in a big board, they are excellent at poaching eyes.

wtbob2• 12 years ago

Crazy Stone and Nomitan are locked in a game of Go, the Eastern version of chess.

Ummm, the Japanese version of chess is…chess. It's called shogi. There's also a Chinese version of chess, xiangqi. There are, I believe, Vietnamese, Korean, Burmese and perhaps other varieties of chess. There's certainly no common 'Eastern version of chess' any more than there's a common 'Easter version of food.'

Go is a Japanese game of considerably greater complexity than chess.

jamesli• 12 years ago

Thumb up on the comments on "the East Version of Chess".

Go is not a Japanese game, though. It was originated in China more than 2000 years ago. It is very popular in both China, Japan, and South Korea. [I don't know how it is in North Korea.]

hyperpape11• 12 years ago

North Korea has a number of strong players--probably better than those in Europe and the US. They've competed in a few international events.

squidfood4• 12 years ago

As "an abstract strategy game that is considered culturally to be a symbol of intelligence, deep thought and deep tradition", the analogy works for me.

stcredzero5• 12 years ago

Chess as an indication of intelligence is an American cultural quirk. In other parts of the world, people just think that means someone is good at chess.

wutbrodo2• 12 years ago

Wasn't chess invented in India? Chess itself is the eastern version of chess haha.

est• 12 years ago

More like invented in Persia.

Cookingboy• 12 years ago

Go is actually a Chinese game, it's just that the Westerners learned about it from Japan and thus adopted all the Japanese terminologies.

RRRA• 12 years ago

My impression was that recently Go had fallen too...

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2014/03/the-e...

DerpDerpDerp• 12 years ago

The victory was not quite a Deep Blue moment; Crazy Stone was given a small handicap, and Ishida is no longer in his prime.

As I heard the story, the computer received something like 4 stones (a moderate handicap), and was playing against someone who no longer was top-of-the-world, but was still a strong player.

This is very different than beating the world champion in a fair game.

karamazov• 12 years ago

A four-stone handicap is not small: a beginning professional player could give any top Go player (there are several major championships) a run for his money with 4 stones.

microtherion• 12 years ago

That was with a handicap, not an even starting position.

civilian2• 12 years ago

Obviously we should teach Octopi how to play Go! https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7730808

h1karu• 12 years ago

HIKARU!!!!!!!! NO GO!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-LHI1MC6Gc

captaincrowbar• 12 years ago

"It is neither daring nor original to predict that within decades the world's best chess player will be a machine ... Other games such as Go are presently less susceptible to machine analysis, a fact which sometimes provokes incredible displays of intellectual snobbery from Go players who like to denigrate chess as a child's game. When in due course a machine also becomes the top Go player, such people will no doubt move to games like snakes-and-ladders where computers have no detectable advantage." -- David Langford (1979)

S_A_P• 12 years ago

Isn't this really mis-titled? "Computers" don't win anything. The software is what cant "win" right now. Even though Im sure there is a lot of effort by various companies, academia and individuals into AI, is there really much development being put into beating a go grand master?

CurtMonash• 12 years ago

Some years back, I played a lot of Igowin on my home PC. At that time it was restricted to a 9x9 board.

I'm not a very good go player at all, but I actually had one game in which I gave it a 5 stone advantage and managed to beat it.

I should add that the current IOS Igowin seems to be decidedly better than I am, or than I was then.

The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can’t Win

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