Computer Go reference bots

Interested in Computer Go? Then you probably already know about Don Dailey's excellent work on providing a number of Monte Carlo reference implementations. So far, he has managed to implement it in two three different languages (Java, C and some language called Vala).

The announcement is here and the Java bot is available here. It's not the prettiest Java code out there, but Don is a C programmer (I think) so he is excused. It was very interesting and educating to study the code. I've been reading a lot of the Monte Carlo Computer Go papers but I've always felt as if I've missed something fundamental since my understanding of how it works felt too... simple.

Now that I've seen the code I can say, with confidence, that it *is* quite simple. Implementing a Monte Carlo method, that is. Getting a decent (let alone, good) AI-player for 19x19 Go seems quite far from simple.

1, 2, 4, 8, 16, ...

How far can you calculate the expansion of the series 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, ... in your head? And, no. You can't use pen and paper or anything.

What would *you* do with a thousand cores?

Anwar Ghuloum's post Unwelcome advice has caused a bit of a stir recently. Probably not in the way he wanted though. The comments are full of questions and doubts about whether they (Intel) can back up their claims of soon-to-come-thousands-of-cores-processors. And, more importantly, if they *can* - programming in itself will be very different from how we do it today so it's meaningless to think about it in terms of how it's done now.

But, regardless of all that... More than a thousand cores in a single processor. What would *you* do with that? One area that I think looks particularly promising is Computer Go. That many cores may well be the tipping point of AI players in Go. Will they finally be able to move up into the (professional) Dan levels?

In the upcoming tournament at the European Go Congress (in Leksand, Sweden) they're provding hardware with 2 cores. If we ignore practical scaling problems for a minute, what would the effect of an additional 998 cores be? Many of the top players today (like MoGo and CrazyStone) rely on "easily" parallellizable statistical methods (see UCT and Monte Carlo methods for more info). And the more playouts you can perform within a given time the better the resulting play. At least in theory.

I may well be underestimating the problem. I know. But it would be very interesting to see how much of an improvement can be made by just adding more raw power.

Make a Peace-toy

The Stockholm local group of the Swedish Peace and Arbitration Society (SPAS) has arranged a contest in designing "peace-toys". It's a very interesting idea, and a rather difficult one if you ask me, since peace is almost always defined negatively (i.e. peace is the absence of war). It will be very interesting to see what people come up with.

I suggested to Sofia that we should design a variant of the classic board game Risk modified to use non-violent techniques of conflict management. Obviously the game's ultimate goal cannot be world domination and it can't be something, like world democratization, where everyone is a winner either. It's probably going to be very difficult just to figure out the basis for the game. I haven't spent enough time thinking about it and I don't have much hope of participating since the deadline is 1/9 and I don't think Sofia and I will have much time to spend on it during summer but maybe if it rains a lot. Let's hope so ;-)