[gnugo-devel] Edmondton impressions

[bump]

There is an article today about Computer Go with pictures from
the Edmondton tournament in the NY Times. It is a pretty good
article about the difficulty of the problem by Katie Hafner.

Marcus Enzenberger has a Java GTP client which he is considering
releasing as free software. It looks very useful. He is now in
Edmondton working with Martin Mueller. Neurogo did surprisingly
well in the Edmondton tournament. (Both Neurogo and Aya placed
ahead of GNU Go.)

I had dinner with Tristan Cazenave and Bruno Bouzy and others.
Tristan is willing to consider opening the code to Golois. There
would then be a second free program, this one in C++. I hope he
will do this.

Takeshiro Yoshikawa of Kiseido is working on Go programming and
has some stuff that he may open up. This includes a testsuite.

Hiroshi Yamashita will enter GNU Go in the CFG tournament
again this year if there are an odd number of contestants.

Among the talks, I found Georg Santze's talk about Dreihirn
interesting. He is from Althofer's group. The Dreihirn consists
of a human moderator selecting moves from two computers. The
resulting agent may be stronger than either the human moderator
or either program. This is convincingly proved in both Chess
and Go. An alternative scheme has the moderator selecting
from the top n moves of a computer program. I think such an
experiment with GNU Go could be useful in giving an upper
bound for the strength of metamachine which attempts to
select the best of GNU Go's top two moves. If such an experiment
were successful we could try to improve metamachine's selection
of the top two moves using full board search at 2 ply or deeper.

Dan