Computer Go and Windows HPC Server

Last year, at PDC 2008, the Windows HPC Server team presented a cluster of computers playing the game of Go. This video shows the gorgeous Surface interface:

(If the game of Go is new to you, visit:

http://www.gobase.org

There is lot of information, and the rules of the game. There is a section dedicated only to Computer Go:

http://gobase.org/information/computers/

)

David Fotland is the author of the program of the video. David is a reknowned computer go developer.  There is an email of David, explaining his program and his deal with Windows HPC Server:

http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/2008-November/017025.html

(That is THE mailing list to follow, if you want to know more the computer go problem). David programmed a MonteCarlo approach, using MPI and the Windows HPC Cluster.

ManyFacesOfGo awarded the computer world championship, last year, running on a Windows HPC Server cluster (competition results). Note: the second program was running using a cluster, too. There is more info about the (commercial) ManyFacesOfGo program at:

http://www.smart-games.com/

2008 was a year full of surprised in computer go arena. Actually, the programs can’t beat a professional or strong amateur human player, but the odds are changing. You can read:

Latest Advance in Artificial Intelligence: Computer Wins a Game Against a Go Master

and the Wikipedia page on Computer Go:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go

After decades of poor results, the computer programs begin to beat strong human players, but there is a lot of improvement to do. The complexity of the game avoids the use of brute force methods: I guess the solution will be a mixture of brute force, clustering, MonteCarlo, and more classical planning methods.

I have my own program framework, AjGo to explore algorithms that can be used in this fascinating game, the “hard problem” in AI board games. This is an screenshot of the main form:

Spanish posts explaining the program:

AjGo- hacia un programa que juegue al go
Computer Go y el programa AjGo

I keep a collection of links about Computer Go at delicious and at my personal site:

http://delicious.com/ajlopez/computergo
Computer Go links

Angel “Java” Lopez
http://www.ajlopez.com/en
http://twitter.com/ajlopez