"Computers are unable to defeat the world's best Go players, but that may change with the application of a new strategy that promises to revolutionize artificial intelligence."

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Founder, Central Mississippi Go Club
Free tips and resources for clubs and teaching
Go Kit Club Pack - pack of 13x13 go sets for clubs
Go Tin - very portable go

a)This posting belongs in a different section of the forum (computer go)

b) I think you might have meant a more informative abstract?
I haven't bothered to keep up my membership so can't read the paper. But I rather suspect it isn't really about go playing specifically but rather whether our concept of AI needs to change. Previously there was just one (other) sort of AI that "just worked" as opposed to depending on human knowledge (a "neural net" gets "trained" to be able to perform a task -- the human trainers have to tell it "right" or "wrong" but otherwise it evolves a solution as it "learns" to perform the task). In this case the MCTS algorithm solves the problem of playing a reasonably strong game of go by a different "just works" method.

Note that this may really be more about the "level" at which we look at intelligence. A natural intelligence (like our own) at some level is below consciousness with it all just being connections or lack of connections netween neurons (modification of connections). In other words, at some low level, it too "just works".

c) The isn't going to be about some (new) breakthrough in go playing programs. You perhaps hadn't gone far enough searching out bits about this paper that you can see without being a member/subscriber. But feugo isn't one of the stronger programs at the current state of the art (just the strongest "free" one).

Hi Mike, I think this depends on what "mainstream" means to the submitter... (but I agree that this suits a post in Computer Go.) If I saw something Go related in the ArXiV for dynamical systems, I may think this as "mainstream Go sighting" (well, I may refrain from posting it here, but would think it is close enough to think about it)

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Geek of all trades, master of none: the motto for my blog mostlymaths.net

I actually remember when you could play go on steam (valves game library client) against people on your friends list. That was back in 2003 from memory, you could also play chess and checkers.

All of my friends tried it at least once, it reached a mainstream of gamers. Anyone else remember that? There was also chess and checkers and stuff.

"Bitter Seeds and the Game of Go"

Mainstream "Gweek" podcast 032 Smargo Kifu iPad app review and basic description of the game begins at 40:43 and lasts for about 3 minutes.

http://boingboing.net/2011/12/26/gweek- ... nd-th.html

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Founder, Central Mississippi Go Club
Free tips and resources for clubs and teaching
Go Kit Club Pack - pack of 13x13 go sets for clubs
Go Tin - very portable go

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

Good to see go put in context with some other pastimes on this scale...

Bruce "Play-a" Young

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Currently reading: Plutarch, Cerebus, and D&Q 25th Anniversary

That paper (Kroeker) is not a proper scientific paper, rather a popular science magazine style talking about Monte Carlo search applied to Go. Just 3 pages. Nothing much worth mentioning, though probably good to get attention of people that didn't hear about Go and/or Monte-Carlo.

References can be more useful if you are interested:

Indeed. It was a mainstream paper: not a scientific paper but a popular science article, and not in a go magazine but on a non-go magazine. I thought this thread was about telling others about mainstream sightings, not about assessing their educational value.

This comic just made front page of USGO.org's news feed.
I don't know about you guys, but I am personally interpreting that as an official endorsement of the game "seven minutes in heaven" by the AGA board.

I'll be sure to check next month's meeting minutes for the official announcement.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E_TgM0pCDvI
I don't know how mainstream this is, but you can see people playing Go at the beginning.

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a1h1 [1d]: You just need to curse the gods and defend.
Good Go = Shape.
Associação Portuguesa de Go

Terminator The Sarah Connor Chronicles

S02E10 "Strange Things Happen at the One Two Point"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s73zUByBv3A

Sorry if duplicate, hadn't seen this posted. From Jul 9, 2011

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Founder, Central Mississippi Go Club
Free tips and resources for clubs and teaching
Go Kit Club Pack - pack of 13x13 go sets for clubs
Go Tin - very portable go

Thanks, that's hilarious.

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The Adkins Principle:
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Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

Randomly looking through books at Barnes and Noble the other day and found "The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick." Randomly opened the book to page 88 and found an obscure reference to a "Go board," capitalization theirs.
Book is by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem.

http://www.amazon.com/Exegesis-Philip-K-Dick/dp/0547549253/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1329058477&sr=8-1

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David Bogie, Boise ID
I play go, I ride a recumbent, of course I use Macintosh.

I'm listening to an audiobook of Alison Croggon's The Naming. It's a fantasy about a slave girl who turns out to be the only surviving member of a major house of bards.

In the bards' hall to which she is taken and trained in, a game called Gis is played, and it is surely either actually Go or inspired by it.

I can't post an exact description, since it is an audiobook and I am past that part, but it is played on a hexagonal table, where black and white counters are played on a board of many small squares. The main character enjoys watching the patterns evolve, grow and disappear in the course of the game. She is told that learning the game is a lifetime pursuit. Later, a character described as the hall's best player mentions a book she likes called The Strange Flowers of Gis.

I do not think Gis will be an important plot point (especially since they are about to leave the hall) but it's prominently there. I believe this is the first book in a series, so there may be more later, too.

EDIT: Just found this on the author's website:
"More astonishing discoveries include the fact that the Bards had a working theory of evolution and natural selection, which becomes very clear in the many texts written around the game of Gis, which was very popular in Bardic culture. Many Bards wrote about the game, but it was Intathen of Gent who first theorised Gis as a model of competing populations of species, and even of evolutionary tendencies within a single psyche."

I see a few other references to Gis, so it must be in some of the other series books as well.

In Code lyoko episode 29 one of the main characters plays go.

Pani Poni Dash!, episode 15: Endure Patiently and You Will Not Wilt.

The class school bus is teetering on the edge of a cliff. Since they are forbidden to interfere, the alien observers find various pastimes as they wait to see if Class 1-C will plummet to a gruesome death.

The picture shows the game up to move 146 of Game 5 of the 6th Japanese Honinbo Final between Hashimoto Utaro 8p (W) and Sakata Eio 7p (B) played on May 31st, 1951.
Guess the aliens are well aware of Japanese go game records and how to replay them. Maybe they even own a copy of GoGOD.

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http://tchan001.wordpress.com
A blog on Asian go books, go sightings, and interesting tidbits
Go is such a beautiful game.

There's an LA times article on Go today. Well, it's actually about Curtis Tang, a go player in LA. http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-holland-20120424,0,2904088.column

In the movie Summer Wars, Matsuki brings Kenji to a family reunion celebrating her grandmother's 90th birthday. We first see the grandmother as she sits replaying a game out of a book. Later in the movie, Kenji joins her at the goban, but just to play cards on it.



EDIT: Whoops, I see Jedo mentioned it in December. Well. Now you have pictures. ^^