Cracking Go

prostoalex writes "IEEE Spectrum looks at current trends in artificial technology to crack the ancient Chinese game of Go, which theoretically has 10^60 potential endings. Is conquering the game via exhaustive search of all possibilities possible? 'My gut feeling is that with some optimization a machine that can search a trillion positions per second would be enough to play Go at the very highest level. It would then be cheaper to build the machine out of FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) instead of the much more expensive and highly unwieldy full-custom chips. That way, university students could easily take on the challenge.'"

I don't care how good it is

[techpawn]

A computer will never beat a kid possessed by the ghost of an Edo period Spirit! [wikipedia.org]

Re:What about this idea?

[Anonymous Coward]

What, a Bewowolf cluster of them?

Re:Exhaustive?

[phantomfive]

Read the article. Essentially, he has been spending all his time searching for ways to prune that tree to a reasonable level. He thinks that he has enough pruning techniques, and that computers have sped up enough, to solve the game of Go within the next 5 years.

Unfortunately for him, he is working for Microsoft labs in China, and since 2008 is well known to be the projected year of linux on the desktop, Microsoft won't be around long enough to continue funding his project. Sigh.

Re:Sure it is possible to search 10^60

[$RANDOMLUSER]

But don't expect to finish the game yourself.

More like don't expect your grandchildren to finish the game. ;)

More like don't expect your species to finish the game.

Nice.

[Mahjub Sa'aden]

I like that.

Sometimes I imagine Go as the essence of life, distilled into a binary adversarial form. Of course, I snap out of it when my neighbours explain I can't just take their cars because "they had no liberties" when I double-park.

Re:I don't care how good it is

[Anonymous Coward]

Anonymous coward.

Re:I don't care how good it is

[melikamp]

hypocrite

Re:I don't care how good it is

[Anonymous Coward]

Failure
would have had two levels of funny if you posted AC.

Re:What about this idea?

[fractoid]

No, he was going to say "what about a bewb", because bewbs are the best thing evar. But then he thought better of it.

Heheh. Bewbiez.

Re:I don't care how good it is

[olehenning]

It's filled with blacks and whites and they keep killing eachother for land?