jiml@uwslh.UUCP (James E. Leinweber) (09/24/87)
Go is widely played in the orient. In Japan there are over 300
professionals and they televise speed tournaments, every newspaper has
a Go column, etc. There has been considerable work worldwide on Go
playing programs, though the results aren't up to the caliber of the
chess programs yet. Lately Peter Langston has been running computer
tourneys at Usenix meetings. The caliber of play was low at the one I
saw (June '86 Atlanta), but rising rapidly. The previous years winner
came in last, for example.
For the uninitiated, Go is played between two players, white and
black, on a 19x19 grid. They alternate placing stones on unoccupied
intersections. You may not repeat a previous position, and stones
which are immediately surrounded along all adjacent grid lines become
captured and are removed. Connected groups which surround two
separate empty regions are impregnable (think about it), so the board
is eventually filled with formations which are too big to kill and too
small to invade. When the players agree on what belongs to whom, you
count the occupied plus surrounded points, and the one with the most
wins. (No flames from other Go players about Japanese rules please;
this is the elegant Tiawanese version.) Congratulations, you now know
all the rules, and can spend the next 30 years learning the strategy :-)
Go players are traditionally ranked by skill level from 35 kyu (knows
the rules) up to 1 kyu, and then from 1 dan to 7 dan (professional
caliber). The professionals have a different 1 dan to 9 dan ranking,
with 9 dan at a level which in the chess world corresponds to former
world champions. Among amateurs, each 1 kyu or dan difference in
ranks corresponds to one handicap stone. Unequal games are usually
handicapped, with the weaker player (black) taking 2-9 moves in a row
at the start, in traditional patterns. A 9 stone handicap is the
largest used in ordinary play, and corresponds about to a queen
advantage in chess. The theoretical advantage of such a handicap is
estimated from 9 dan games (the gods at war ... :-) at about 140 points,
though amateurs don't attack hard enough to do that well.
It's quite true that you can't play Go by mere brute alpha-beta
search: on a 19x19 grid for most of the game you have over 200 legal
moves each turn, even if only two or three are worth considering.
The best Go playing program I know of is by Bruce Wilcox, called
Nemesis. It costs $75 for IBM PC's and should be available on
Macintoshes this fall. Nemesis is currently rated about 15 kyu,
comparable to a beginner who has played steadily for, say, four months.
This is an outgrowth of Wilcox's Ph.D. work with Walter Reitman at the
University of Michigan in Ann Arbor.
For more information, ask the American Go Association, P.O. box 397,
Old Chelsea Station, New York, NY 10113. Or drop me an e-mail message.
Go programs are too complex to run as emacs modes, though an interface
to one would do OK, and could easily be adapted from the Go-Moku mode.
Since the topic is no longer emacs related, I have directed followups
to comp.games.go.
Jim Leinweber, 5 kyu jiml@uwslh.uucp jiml%uwslh.uucp@cs.wisc.edu
...!{seismo,harvard,topaz,ihnp4,...}!uwvax!uwslh!jiml
State Laboratory of Hygiene @ Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison; (608) 262-8092
--
Jim Leinweber jiml@uwslh.uucp jiml%uwslh.uucp@cs.wisc.edu
...!{seismo,harvard,topaz,ihnp4,...}!uwvax!uwslh!jiml
State Laboratory of Hygiene @ Univ. of Wisconsin - Madison; (608) 262-8092