HPCwire: Dutch Supercomputer Establishes New Go Record

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March 02, 2009

Dutch Supercomputer Establishes New Go Record

AMSTERDAM, the Netherlands, and TAINAN, Taiwan, March 2 -- At the Taiwan Open 2009 held in Taiwan from Feb. 10-13, the Dutch national supercomputer Huygens, which is located at SARA Computing and Networking Services in Amsterdam, defeated two human Go professionals in an official match. This is the second victory of Huygens playing Go against professional players. During the first two days of the event, the Go program MoGo TITAN set two new world records by winning a 19x19 competition with a 7-stones handicap against the 9P dan professional Go player Jun-Xun Zhou, and a 19x19 competition with a 6-stones handicap against the 1P dan professional Go player Li-Chen Chien.

The first victory of the Huygens supercomputer was achieved in August 2008 at the 24th Annual Congress of the Go competition, held in Portland, Ore., when the 8P dan human Go professional Kim MyungWan was defeated in an official match with a 9-stones handicap.

After the victory of IBM's Deep Blue against Garry Kasparov, the game of Go has replaced chess as a test bed for research in artificial intelligence (AI). Go is one of the last board games where the strongest humans are still able to easily win against AI. Although there has been quite a lot of research in the Go domain for 40 years, the progress in Computer Go has been slow. However, researchers have discovered new performing algorithms and computers are catching up really fast. Since 2006, when a new algorithm called Monte-Carlo Tree Search was proposed, the level of Go programs has improved drastically. The application 'MoGo TITAN', developed by INRIA France and ...

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