santiago@ak1a.dec.com (Ed Santiago HL2-2/C07 225-7281) (07/27/86)
BYTE published sources in FORTH for a Go board manager for the Macintosh some time ago (1984?), back when the Mac was pretty new. I have the issue at my school apt, so I can't make sure of my information, but I'm pretty sure it's the issue with the special section on Apple computers at the end of the magazine. Its theme was Telecommunications or something like that. If I was forced to make a rough guess I'd say August 1984. Note that this was NOT a program to actually play Go, it just kept track of the pieces while two human opponents entered moves. To the best of my knowledge, nobody has yet come out with any halfway decent Go-playing programs. The game is extremely difficult to represent heuristically, unlike Chess wherein it is relatively easy to assign points to certain moves and positions and use some best-weight tree scanning routine to generate a "best" move. This will obviously play a mediocre (at best) game, but the point is that as far as I know no one has come up with any Go equivalent of even this simple method. When you consider the number of moves it has to consider at each turn it's easily understood why! -Ed Santiago Disclaimer: These are my opinions, and I have been known to make tismakes. If anybody knows of a real Go playing program and has sources, or has info on any new developments in the area of Go-playing automatons, I will be very glad to be proven wrong!