September 3, 2008

Computer Beats Pro at US Go Congress

Slashdot | Computer Beats Pro At US Go Congress
Bob Hearn writes:

“I was in attendance at the US Go Congress match yesterday where history was made: the go program MoGo, running on an 800-core supercomputer, beat 8-dan professional go player Myungwan Kim in a 9-stone handicap game. Most in the audience were shocked at the computer’s performance; it was naturally assumed that the computer would be slaughtered, as usual. Go is often seen as the last bastion of human superiority over computers in the domain of board games. But if Moore’s law continues to hold up, today’s result suggests that the days of human superiority may be numbered.”

I am a Go player, and started my ph.d. research on computer approaches to go in the early 90′s. This is an amazing achievement. Some commentators have downplayed the significance because the Go program received a 9-stone handicap. But what they don’t realize is that a serious amateur Go player (like myself) would not likely be able to beat a professional 8-dan player with that same handicap.
The approach used by these Go programs, which involves simulating millions of random games to the very end and backing up the outcomes to select the best current move, is similar to what my friend Bruce Abramson developed in his PhD work on “Expected Outcome” model of learning and search.
It’s interesting to see these ideas take 20 years to yield fruit.
I think we’re going to see a lot more progress based on AI ideas developed in the 80′s and early 90′s over the next 5 years.
My prediction for when a Go program beats a human professional with no handicap: 2015.

Posted by barney on September 3, 2008 at 11:00 am | No Comments

June 1, 2005

General Game Playing Program Competition at Stanford today!

Prof. Michael Genesereth‘s General Game Playing class today conducted a general game playing competition. This was particularly exciting to me as I first defined this, under the name Meta-Game Playing (or Metagame), as an AI research challenge and developed the first such playing programs during my Ph.D. research 1989-93. While there have been a few computer science classes that used my testbed over the years, this was the first time I got to see an actual general game playing competition, and one that didn’t use my software or my definition of the class of games (though I did advise on the design of the class and the format of the competition).
As their main project for the course, students worked in teams to develop programs that take in the rules of games encoded in a very abstract logical language and play those games, which the students may never have seen before, without any human assistance. Today, on the last day of the course, the students’ programs were given the rules of 3 different games:

continue reading the General Game Playing Program Competition at Stanford today!

Posted by barney on June 1, 2005 at 8:01 pm | No Comments

January 1, 1996

Barney Pell’s Research on Computer Game Playing

Below are my publications on computer game playing.


My love of games started when my grandfather taught me to play chess at the age of 5 and continues through this day. While I have studied chess and go as a tournament player, I also like the challenge of learning new games. Part of the fun for me is playing with the rules to discover the strategies that follow from them. This is part of the fascination that led to my research on computer game-playing for specific games (e.g. chess, go, bridge) and ultimately to my thesis work on general game playing.

Publications

Other Links

Related work on Metagame and General Game Playing Programs:

Posted by barney on January 1, 1996 at 9:20 pm | 1 Comment