Human vs. Computer Go Competitions in Taiwan

I was in Taiwan last week to visit researchers and participate in the IEEE CIG conference. One of the events was a man-machine competition. The human side was represented by three professionals and three high dan amateurs. The professionals were Chou Chun-Hsun 9p, Chang Kai-Hsin 5p and Yu Li-Chun 1p. The three programs were Zen and Aya from Japan and a new Taiwanese program, CGI. CGI stands for "CGI Go Intelligence", and CGI is also the name of Prof. I-Chen Wu's research group. Each program played a total of four games, one against an amateur and one against each of the pro's. The handicaps against the professionals were fixed at 4 for Zen, 5 for Aya, and 6 for CGI. Against the amateurs, Zen played on even while the other programs took 2 stones. Aya was most successful, winning 3 games and losing only against Yu 1p. (However, that game was a massacre...) Zen and CGI won one game each.

Links:
CIG conference
Human vs Computer event
Results in detail
KGS game records under accounts cigzen, cigaya and cigcgi.

Deep Convolutional Neural Networks are strong move predictors for Go

There has been lots of progress recently on the topic of move prediction in Go, and it is very promising for improving Monte Carlo-based programs. I give some background and analyze two games on
http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/fuego/Convolutional-Neural-Network.html
The thing to keep in mind is that the network does not do any game tree search.

    Martin

The game between Yoda and Crazy Stone; news about Lim Jaebum and his program Dol Baram

Remi sent me the game record, and I put it on
http://webdocs.cs.ualberta.ca/~mmueller/fuego/2014-UEC.html
(If you see a different or mixed up game record, try reloading the page. Some caching issue.)

Lim Jaebum, the programmer of the strong Korean program Dol Baram, came to visit Densei-sen. He explained what had happened. He actually did originally come to Japan for the UEC cup, but he discovered a serious bug in his program, and he did not manage to fix it in time. So he decided to pull out of the UEC cup, and went back to Korea, where he did find the bug. Finally, he came back to Japan to attend Densei-sen as a spectator. He said that Dol Baram will play in future KGS tournaments.

In the audience: Hiroshi Yamashita (Aya) and Lim Jaebum (Dol Baram)

In the audience: Shinichi Sei (Katsunari)

On stage: Shimosaka Miori 2 Dan pro, Hideki Kato (Zen) and Remi Coulom (Crazy Stone)

Three senseis watching: Muramatsu, Nakayama and Matsubara

Remi gets his diploma for beating Yoda from Prof. Ito...

...and Yoda gets his diploma for beating Zen.

2nd Densei Sen game 2: Yoda beats Zen

The game was close, but Zen was a few points ahead. However, it made a few endgame mistakes, and possibly also missed a technique that reduced its territory by two points. Zen resigned, but it looked like losing by 1.5 points or so in the end. This was also a four stone game.

2nd Densei sen first game: Crazy Stone wins against Yoda

The second Densei sen, a handicap match between a top professional and the first and second place programs at the UEC Cup, is under way.

http://entcog.c.ooco.jp/entcog/densei/eng/index.html

Crazy Stone won the first game by 3 points. The handicap was 4 stones, same as last year. Crazy Stone played a strong game and was more than 10 points ahead. It then played some crazy defensive moves instead of finishing the last few endgame moves, so the final score became close.

Kobayashi Satoru 9 Dan comments on the game between Yoda and Crazy Stone. "tsuyoi" (strong)

Zen wins exhibition game against strong amateur player

Zen beat Tanaka Yoshikuni, a strong amateur player and member of the UEC Go club. Zen killed a very large group. Redmond and Osawa did the commentary with some help from O Meien.

Tanaka Yoshikuni playing Zen

UEC Cup final standings

1. Zen
2. Crazy Stone
3. Aya
4. HiraBot
5.Nomitan
6. GOGATAKI
7. LeafQuest
8. caren
9. MC_ark
10. Katsunari
11. storm
12. milago
13. MP-Fuego
14. Qinoa Igo
15. Mayoigo
16. ballade

Main knockout tournament

Places 3-8

Places 9-16