[comp.ai.neural-nets] NNs and Go

Guszti.Bartfai@comp.vuw.ac.nz (Guszti Bartfai) (03/18/91)

Hello NNetters,

Sorry for keep you waiting for this summary so long. Here are some interesting
info that you might find useful and worth investigating further.

 * there is a newsgroup rec.games.go, that might be useful to follow.

 * there are two sites where you can find go information.

   ftp   scam.berkeley.edu  in  /src/local   I think
         blake.u.washington.edu who knows where.

 * Gerry Tesauro, who is at IBM Watson, created the winner of the
   Computer Games Olympiad Backgammon competition in 1989.  This is the first
   time a learning program won over hand-crafted programs.  A brief report is
   in Neural Computation vol 1 no. 3 (Fall 1989).  The initial work
   was reported at NIPS 1 in 1988 and is in the proceedings
   (Neural Information Processing Systems vol 1, Touretzky, Ed., Morgan
   Kaufmann 1989)
   Other papers are
	Tesauro & Sejnowski, "A parallel network that learns to play
   backgammon", Artificial Intelligence 39, 357 (1989), and
	Tesauro, "Neural Network defeats creator in backgammon match"
   T.R. CCSR-88-6, U. of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne Center for Complex
   Research.

 * From: Dave Stoutamire <daves%curie.ces.cwru.edu@RELAY.CS.NET>

   "My thesis is on machine learning applied to go: it is not trivial,
   mainly for computatinal reasons.  I ended up not using NNs for go
   because I didn't want to wait years for them to converge.  Herbert
   Enderton at CMU (andrew.cmu.edu) has been doing some NNs for go for
   his PhD work."

 * From: Barney.Pell@computer-lab.cambridge.ac.uk

   "The following people (certainly the first) have done some work on NNs
   and GO:

     % Herbert.Enderton
     Herbert.Enderton@moriarty.theory.cs.cmu.edu

     %Howard Landman
     landman@sun.com
  
   I do work on Machine Learning and GO, but using logic and/or
   probability, not NNs." 

 * From: landman@Eng.Sun.COM (Howard A. Landman)

   "...papers dealing with the computational complexity of GO

   Lichtenstein & Sipser, "Go is PSPACE-hard"
   (don't have the date or journal in front of me but they were posted to the
   net a couple of months ago)

   Yedwab, Laura, "On Playing Well In A Sum Of Games", MIT Masters thesis
   under Ron Rivest, available by sending email to (I think)

        	publications@lcs.mit.edu"

 * From: heidi@ucthpx.uct.ac.za (Heidi de Wet)

   "...On a related topic, I saw a reference once to a ... Go program which
   reportedly played to 10 kyu (the Nemesis Go programs play to 20 and
15 kyu). 
   The heart of the program was a so-called cellular automaton - a sort
of
   one-layer NN with feedback.  Each cell was one location on the board,
and
   'vacant' cells could take on one of 15 or so states.  At each move,
the net
   would cycle about 5 times before reaching a stable state, and picking
its
   move.

   ...It comes from a collection of articles from the "Over the Horizon"
   column in the British weekly newspaper "Computing", by one Tony Durham.  The
   book is entitled "Computing Horizons", by Tony Durham, published by Addison-
   Wesly, 1988.  ISBN 0-201-18046-4."

  
I have put all the replies into a file, which I'm happy to send anyone
who is interseted.

Thanks everyone who has responded.




-- 
--- Guszti Bartfai ---		Mail:	P.O. Box 600, Wellington, NZ.
				Phone:	+64 4 721-000 ext. 8580  
				E-mail:	guszti@comp.vuw.ac.nz 
				FAX:	+64 4 712 070