

The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That Computers Still Can’t Win - mr_golyadkin
http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go

======
zweiterlinde
Previous discussion:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732393](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7732393)

~~~
wglb
This one is actually the third submission: [https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22the-
world-of-computer-go%22#!/s...](https://hn.algolia.com/?q=%22the-world-of-
computer-go%22#!/story/forever/0/%22the-world-of-computer-go%22)

------
cjbprime
For a dissenting opinion, see my blog post from 2012:
[http://blog.printf.net/articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-
ver...](http://blog.printf.net/articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-very-good-at-
the-game-of-go/)

~~~
gnuvince
Very interesting read, thanks for posting it! I'm not really familiar with
that domain, could you tell me whether it's possible that the reason Go bots
are not as strong as chess bots (in relation to humans) is simply because
chess is a much more popular game that, and more time and effort has gone into
making those AI stronger? Go is touted as having a much larger search space
than chess, but that probably means that it's harder for humans as well, no?

~~~
cjbprime
You're welcome. Popularity might well be some of it, but I think that effect's
worn off by now.

I think the main reason has to do with score estimation. With chess, you can
say that a queen is worth 8 points and a rook is worth 5 and a bishop's worth
3, and get a quick idea of who's winning a game. In Go, every piece has the
same value, and whether a stone is useful depends on which other stones it's
connected to, and whether those stones are going to be alive at the end of the
game. So just to work out whether you're winning, you have to be able to do
search all the way to the end of the game and work out who wins! And computers
have been getting that process wrong until recently.

The extra search space doesn't make Go harder for humans too, because humans
play both Chess and Go very differently to computers. A human never tries to
calculate the value of a million possible moves, so the question of how many
million possible moves there are to search through just isn't relevant to a
human. Humans play both Chess and Go largely using pattern recognition and
insight in a way that computers are not currently able to model.

------
jimmaswell
What a rambling purple-prose article. Why can't it just cut to the point? Why
should I care what the people were wearing? Why does that merit a paragraph of
description?

