The program was MoGo, http://www.lri.fr/~gelly/MoGo.htm, but I don't know anything about the "borrowed" hardware. Peter
On 8/8/08, Peter St. John <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The American Go Association (which has a free e-newsletter) at > http://www.usgo.org/ reports that a machine won an exhibition game with a > master last night at the US Go Congress. This isn't really historic; the > master, Myungwan Kim, is an 8 dan professional, and gave 9 handicap stones > to the machine. > > Very roughly, 8 dan pro would be comparable to 9 dan amateur; and very > roughly, Kim would be able to give me 9 stones too (I'm 1 dan amateur and > amateur handicaps equate one stone to one rank, and the mathematician Don > Weiner 6d beats me easily at 6 stones, althugh I should be able to cope at > 5). > > 9 stones is very roughly comparable to queen odds at chess, but the > statistical distributions of Go and Chess are not the same; a Grandmaster of > chess could maybe give me rook odds, not queen odds; knight odds is roughly > comparable to two standard deviations, a rating difference of about 400 > points, and I'm about 800 below the world champion (and I"m comparable in > go and chess). But again speaking very roughly, this result is in the > ballpark of achieving amateur 1 dan status, about the level that Ken > Thompson achieved with Belle in the mid-80's (the first USCF Expert > machine). Odds games in chess do not have the same probabilistic qualities > as in Go; we almost never play odds games in chess anymore (it was popular > for money in the 19th century) but can't get along without handicapping in > Go, games between quite disparate players can be made interesting. > > I haven't found specifics for the machine or the team yet, but to quote the > article: > > 800 processors, at 4.7 Ghz, 15 Teraflops on borrowed supercomputers > > A related article said the machine(s) was sited in Europe. > > Peter >
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