Go On Computers

No, not me cheering for our soon to come robotic overlords. Rather, the game of go played upon computers, and by computers.

Computers can beat some of the world's top chess players, but the most powerful machines have failed at the popular Asian board game "Go" in which human intuition has so far proven key.

Two Hungarian scientists have now come up with an algorithm that helps computers pick the right move in Go, played by millions around the world, in which players must capture spaces by placing black and white marbles on a board in turn.

"On a nine by nine board we are not far from reaching the level of a professional Go player," said Levente Kocsis at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences' computing lab SZTAKI.

Back when I was actually involved in developing computer games we simply assumed that Go would never actually be played by computers at all. It just doesn't lend itself to rational calculation of options, in the way that computers like to do things.

Shows how wrong we were I suppose.