EGC and USGC 2009

Both European Go Congress and US Go Congress over for this time. I do not know so much what happened this year. Only that it was very few Swedish this year, maybe from Sweden arrange the tournament last year. The other thing I get feeling of from EGC is that the pairing and by that the SOS count might not have been fair. But I can not judge that. In USCG an 18 year old amateur player beat 3 professionals to win the ING tournament. Very good.

I do not know why, but there was no computer go tournament in either EGC or USGC. I have no clue why. I have not look to hard either. At Computer Go Info you could find, up to yesterday, that those tournament were canceled. Now they are not to be seen at all in the planned or played tournament lists. If you look through the mail list archive you can probably find why.

361points.com write this about EGC/USGC 2009.

Computer go landmark.

At the US Go Congress, played at the same time as the European Go Congress, they had a computer go event where a 8 dan professional lost to a computer program. OK, I think the program got a 9 stone handicap on a 19x19 board. The article in American Go Associations e-journal is a little bit cryptic. But anyway, it was a program based on the Monte Carlo algorithm, which would scale well with parallel processing. The program used 800 processors borrowed from a supercomputer. It was also featured on slashdot.

Monte Carlo and the brute force used for chess give strength to the programs. But I would not call it thinking. I wonder if soon we could study some new and strong moves made by programs like this to improve our thinking.