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After IBM’s Deep Blue beat Kasparov, one of the last vestiges of human superiority vs computers in board games was the game of Go.
Computers, it seems, are now gaining on humans:
During the Go Tournament in Paris, staged between 22 and 24 March 2008 by the French Go Federation (FFG), the MoGo artificial intelligence (IA) engine developed by INRIA — the French National Institute for Research in Computer Science and Control — running on a Bull NovaScale supercomputer, won a 9×9 game of Go against professional 5th DAN Catalin Taranu. This was the first ever officially sanctioned ‘non blitz’ victory of a ‘machine’ over a Go Master.
9×9 Go is vastly simpler than the full board of 19×19, but the heat’s beginning to be felt.
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I found it interesting that though the computer won on a 9×9 board, the GO master beat it with a 19 stone handicap on the 19×19 board. This is enormous. I believe the spread between the most inexperienced amateur and the best amateur is 15 stones.