Go Board Game

A Go Board Game is a two-person zero-sum, perfect-information, partisan, deterministic board abstract strategy game that follows go game rules.

• Context:
  • It can (typically) have 361 starting moves.
  • It can (typically) have hundreds of possible moves.
  • It can (typically) be difficult to develop a Board Strength Heuristic.
  • It can range from being a Human-vs-Human Go Game to being a Human-vs-Machine Go Game to being a Machine-vs-Machine Go Game.
  • It can be solved by a Go Playing System (that implements a Go-playing algorithm).
  • ...
• Example(s):
  • one between Yuta Iyama and Keigo Yamashita in 2012.
  • one between AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol in 2016.
  • …
• Counter-Example(s):
  • Checkers.
  • Chess.
• See: Monte Carlo Tree Search.

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References

2016

• https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/
  • QUOTE: The game of Go originated in China 3,000 years ago. The rules of the game are simple: players take turns to place black or white stones on a board, trying to capture the opponent's stones or surround empty space to make points of territory. As simple as the rules are, Go is a game of profound complexity. There are an astonishing 10 to the power of 170 possible board configurations - more than the number of atoms in the known universe - making Go a googol times more complex than Chess.

2016

• (Silver et al., 2016) ⇒ David Silver, Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Veda Panneershelvam, Marc Lanctot, Sander Dieleman, Dominik Grewe, John Nham, Nal Kalchbrenner, Ilya Sutskever, Timothy Lillicrap, Madeleine Leach, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Thore Graepel, and Demis Hassabis. (2016). “Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search.” In: Nature, 529(7587). doi:10.1038/nature16961

2015

• http://www.technologyreview.com/view/533496/why-neural-networks-look-set-to-thrash-the-best-human-go-players-for-the-first-time/
  • QUOTE: Experts think there are two reasons why computers have failed to master Go. The first is the sheer number of moves that are possible at each stage of the game. Go players have 19 x 19 = 361 possible starting moves and there are usually hundreds of possible moves at any point in the game. By contrast, the number of moves in chess is usually about 50.

    The second problem is that computers find it difficult to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a board position. In chess, simply adding up the value of each piece left on the board gives a reasonable indication of the strength of a player’s position. But this does not work in Go. “Counting the number of stones each player has is a poor indicator of who is winning,” say Clark and Storkey.

2014

• (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28game%29#Computers_and_Go Retrieved:2014-12-02.
  • In combinatorial game theory terms, Go is a zero-sum, perfect-information, partisan, deterministic strategy game, putting it in the same class as chess, checkers (draughts) and Reversi (Othello); however it differs from these in its game play. Although the rules are simple, the practical strategy is extremely complex.

2014b

• (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/go_(game) Retrieved:2014-11-22.
  • Go is a board game involving two players that originated in ancient China more than 2,500 years ago. It was considered one of the four essential arts of a cultured Chinese scholar in antiquity. Its earliest written reference dates back to the Confucian Analects.

    There is significant strategy and philosophy involved in the game, and the number of possible games is vast (10⁷⁶¹ compared, for example, to the 10¹²⁰ possible in chess), despite its relatively simple rules. The two players alternately place black and white playing pieces, called “stones", on the vacant intersections ("points") of a boards|board with a 19x19 grid of lines. Beginners often play on smaller 9×9 and 13×13 boards, and archaeological evidence shows that game was played in earlier centuries on a board with a 17×17 grid. By the time the game had spread to Korea and Japan in about the 5th and 7th centuries AD respectively, however, boards with a 19×19 grid had become standard. The objective of the game — as the translation of its name implies — is to have surrounded a larger total area of the board with one's stones than the opponent by the end of the game, although this result typically involves many more intricacies than simply using surrounding areas directly. Once placed on the board, stones may not be moved, but stones may be removed from the board if captured — this is done by surrounding an opposing stone or group of stones by occupying all orthogonally-adjacent points. The two players place stones alternately until they reach a point at which neither player wishes to make another move; the game has no set ending conditions beyond this. When a game concludes, the territory is counted along with captured stones and komi (points added to the score of the player with the white stones as compensation for playing second) to determine the winner. Games may also be won by resignation. As of mid-2008, there were well over 40 million Go players worldwide, the overwhelming majority of them living in East Asia. , the International Go Federation has a total of 74 member countries and four Association Members covering multiple countries.

2014c

• Clark, Christopher, and Amos Storkey. “Teaching Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to Play Go." arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.3409 (2014).

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