Tapani Raiko
Helsinki University of Technology, Neural Networks Research Centre
P.O.Box 5400, FIN-02015 HUT, Espoo, Finland
Go is an ancient game, for which it has proven to be very difficult to create an artificial player. Go81 is yet another try in that direction. The main idea is as follows: firstly, create a so called ant that tries to play as well as possible, given that it has to be very fast and slightly randomized. Secondly, use these ants to play the game from the current state to the end several times and make use of the information from these possible futures. This approach avoids the evaluation of an unfinished game, which is perhaps the one thing that makes computer Go so difficult. Two versions of Go81, one for Palm and one for a Linux console, are tested against a shareware program AIGO for Palm and an open source project GNU Go accordingly. The Palm version is as strong as AIGO and the console version is two stones weaker than GNU Go on a 9 by 9 board. The proposed approach can also be used to generate interesting data to be studied with machine learning techniques.