The ancient board game of Go is yielding to automation – this time in the form of the use of Monte Carlo methods. Rémi Coulom has used the technique to develop a Go-playing computer program called Crazy Stone.
Wired Magazine reports that CS is so good it recently won a gold medal at the 11th Computer Olympiad in Turin. The article describes Coulom’s approach at a high level.
More detail is available in a paper entitled “Efficient Selectivity and Backup Operators in Monte-Carlo Tree Search” by the author … 61 page PDF alert. Crazy Stone plays at 9×9 (instead of the traditional 19×19) and can be downloaded here.
AI Invades Go Territory – Wired, Sep, 19, 2006
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I’d forgotten about Go, but this looks like it’d be a lot of fun to play in computerized form.
I’d like to see what the medal ceremonies look like at the Computer Olympiads.