Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Cracking Go

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the brute-force-always-a-fun-solution dept.

prostoalex writes "IEEE Spectrum looks at current trends in artificial technology to crack the ancient Chinese game of Go, which theoretically has 10^60 potential endings. Is conquering the game via exhaustive search of all possibilities possible? 'My gut feeling is that with some optimization a machine that can search a trillion positions per second would be enough to play Go at the very highest level. It would then be cheaper to build the machine out of FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) instead of the much more expensive and highly unwieldy full-custom chips. That way, university students could easily take on the challenge.'"

10 of 328 comments (clear)

  1. I don't care how good it is by techpawn · · Score: 5, Funny

    A computer will never beat a kid possessed by the ghost of an Edo period Spirit!

    --
    Ask not what you can do for your country. Ask what your country did to you
    1. Re:I don't care how good it is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 4, Funny

      Anonymous coward.

    2. Re:I don't care how good it is by melikamp · · Score: 4, Funny

      hypocrite

    3. Re:I don't care how good it is by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

      Failure
      would have had two levels of funny if you posted AC.

    4. Re:I don't care how good it is by olehenning · · Score: 2, Funny

      It's filled with blacks and whites and they keep killing eachother for land?

  2. Re:What about this idea? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    What, a Bewowolf cluster of them?

  3. Re:Exhaustive? by phantomfive · · Score: 4, Funny

    Read the article. Essentially, he has been spending all his time searching for ways to prune that tree to a reasonable level. He thinks that he has enough pruning techniques, and that computers have sped up enough, to solve the game of Go within the next 5 years.

    Unfortunately for him, he is working for Microsoft labs in China, and since 2008 is well known to be the projected year of linux on the desktop, Microsoft won't be around long enough to continue funding his project. Sigh.

    --
    Qxe4
  4. Re:Sure it is possible to search 10^60 by $RANDOMLUSER · · Score: 5, Funny

    But don't expect to finish the game yourself.
    More like don't expect your grandchildren to finish the game. ;)
    More like don't expect your species to finish the game.
    --
    No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
  5. Nice. by Mahjub+Sa'aden · · Score: 5, Funny

    I like that.

    Sometimes I imagine Go as the essence of life, distilled into a binary adversarial form. Of course, I snap out of it when my neighbours explain I can't just take their cars because "they had no liberties" when I double-park.

    --
    What is is all that is. Isn't that obvious?
  6. Re:What about this idea? by fractoid · · Score: 3, Funny

    No, he was going to say "what about a bewb", because bewbs are the best thing evar. But then he thought better of it.

    Heheh. Bewbiez.

    --
    Rampant carbon sequestration destroyed the Dinosaurs' tropical paradise. I'm here to help repair the damage.