Microsoft Research Takes On Go

mikejuk writes "Microsoft Research has used F# and AI to implement a consumer-quality game of Go — arguably the most difficult two-person game to implement. They have used an interesting approach to the problem of playing the game, which is a pragmatic cross between tree search with pruning and machine learning to spot moves with a 'good shape.' The whole lot has been packaged into an XNA-based game with a story."

Comments

Re:WTF?

[TheNetAvenger]

You are not understanding how languages work inherently different.

All the C++ libraries in the world will not change how C++ fundamentally works.

Re:Oh, who cares about quality?

[Alex Belits]

Microsoft keeps a "research team" for the sole purpose of paying people to not work for Microsoft's enemies (what at this point is pretty much everyone else). Microsoft's own interests are so far at odds with any kind of progress in technology, they can't give those "researchers" any projects that Microsoft itself can use in its own products, and this is the fact that I am going to bring to attention every time Microsoft Research is mentioned here.

Re:Oh, who cares about quality?

[Alex Belits]

MSR work goes into a *lot* of Microsoft products. Everything from little improvements to crypto techniques (which are still often huge news in the relevant community), to significant features like grammar checking,

lol problems solved decades ago.

to full-fledged products (Surface is the best-known at present,

Surface is not a product, it's a marketing demo -- no one who was not paid by Microsoft ever bought it.

for example MSR also delevoped the game Allegiance which was somewhat before its time but open-sourced when it wasn't a commercial success).

So they tried to pretend that it is a product, and still failed.

Also, if MS is "only interested in product crap" then why does so much of MSR's work end up in use? Why do they release cool new stuff like Kinect?

Kinect is exactly a kind of "cool technology" that sounds cool in descriptions but consists of primitive hacks, and provides functionality that no one actually wants or needs.

If MS is "maintaining a monopoly at any cost" then why do they support projects like Mono or develop ways to run Linux better inside their hypervisor?

This is what they do to maintain monopoly -- stuff their inferior products into places where no one wants them, and push that as some kind of progress until competition is destroyed.

There is absolutely no excuse for existence of Mono in the face of Qt. There is no point of running a superior OS in VM that requires an inferior one. All those things exist to make people buy into Microsoft way of doing things.

Why would they bother with things like Bing, when they don't have anywhere near a monopoly on search?

Because they believe, they can obtain monopoly on advertising before their monopoly on consumer OS will be destroyed. And because Ballmer is delusional.