[Beowulf] Wired article about Go machine

[Vincent Diepeveen]

Ken Thompson, with all respect forgets to mention something,
that's that there is nothing to earn with computer-go.

You get what you pay for.

Sometimes someone starts a go program first, in order to figure out the
above later. Instantly work stops then and worlds strongest go  
program no longer
gets maintained, let alone gets improved.

A few hobbyists will continue and progress very slowly as a result  
now at clusters,
using worlds most inefficient search that exists in game tree search.  
They didn't
discover even yet how to use efficiently hashtables (which reduces  
the search space
exponential).

In short zero Einstein's in computer-go so far on the search front,
whereas the hardware they can get their hands on for computer-go
is big, and there is a lot possible in computer-go, forward pruning  
and selectivity
works better there than in chess (to say polite). Hopefully a Chinese  
Einstein
one day for computer-go search algorithms.

They already found a lot that works for computer-chess.

For super selective search however you definitely need a few clever  
guys.

It is interesting how you try to grab attention for a game where the  
strongest current commercial
go-program sold less copies than that past 24 hours there was posts  
on this mailing list.

Thanks,
Vincent

On Mar 18, 2009, at 2:56 PM, Peter St. John wrote:

> This article at Wired is about Go playing computers: http:// 
> blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/03/gobrain.html
> Includes a pic of a 24 node cluster at Santa Cruz, and a YouTube  
> video of a famous game set to music :-)
>
> My beef, which started with Ken Thompson saying he was disappointed  
> by how little we learned about human cognition from chess  
> computers, is about statements like this:
>
> "People hoped that if we had a strong Go program, it would teach us  
> how our minds work. But that's not the case," said Bob Hearn, a  
> Dartmouth College artificial intelligence programmer. "We just  
> threw brute force at a program we thought required intellect."
>
> And yet the article points out:
>
> [our brain is an]...efficiently configured biological processor —  
> sporting 1015 neural connections, capable of 1016 calculations per  
> second
>
> Our brains do brute-force massively distributed computing. We just  
> aren't conscious of most of it.
>
> Peter
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