Computer go

a grand challenge to ai

Xindi Cai

Donald C. Wunsch

pp. 443-465

in: Włodzisław Duch, Jacek Mańdziuk (eds), Challenges for computational intelligence, Berlin, Springer, 2007

Abstract

The oriental game of Go is among the most tantalizing unconquered challenges in artificial intelligence after IBM's DEEP BLUE beat the world Chess champion in 1997. Its high branching factor prevents the conventional tree search approach, and long-range spatiotemporal interactions make position evaluation extremely difficult. Thus, Go attracts researchers from diverse fields who are attempting to understand how computers can represent human playing and win the game against humans. Numerous publications already exist on this topic with different motivations and a variety of application contexts. This chapter surveys methods and some related works used in computer Go published from 1970 until now, and offers a basic overview for future study. We also present our attempts and simulation results in building a non-knowledge game engine, using a novel hybrid evolutionary computation algorithm, for the Capture Go game.