[/floatr]Guardian: Computers just can't seem to get past Go
When Garry Kasparov was beaten, to his furious humiliation, by IBM's Deep Blue chess computer in 1997, it left human players pondering their future. [But] there is still a board game in which humans reign supreme. The game is Go, an oriental game of strategy...Even the lure of a US$1 million prize for the first program to beat a human professional went uncollected...Bob Myers, who runs the Intelligent Go website. [says] "A very rough estimate might be that the evaluation function [for computer Go] is, at best, 100 times slower than chess, and the branching factor is four times greater at each play; taken together, the performance requirements for a chess-like approach to Go can be estimated as 1027 times greater than that for computer chess. Moore's Law holds that computing power doubles every 18 months, so that means we might have a computer that could play Go using these techniques sometime in the 22nd century"[I]...more...[/I]
