French software and Dutch national Supercomputer Huygens establish a new world record in Go
25 February 2009
A new world record in Go established by PRACE prototype and French software
At the Taiwan Open 2009, held in Taiwan from February 10-13, the Dutch national supercomputer Huygens, which is located at SARA Computing and Networking Services in Amsterdam, defeated two human Go professionals in an official match. This is the second victory of Huygens playing Go against professional players. During the first two days of the event, the Go program MoGo TITAN sets two new world records by winning a 19x19 competition with a 7-stones handicap against the 9P dan professional Go player Jun-Xun Zhou, and a 19x19 competition with a 6-stones handicap against the 1P dan professional Go player Li-Chen Chien.
The first victory of the Huygens supercomputer was achieved in August 2008 at the 24th Annual Congress of the Go competition, held in Portland, Oregon when the 8P dan human Go professional Kim MyungWan was defeated in an official match with a 9-stones handicap.
After the victory of IBM's Deep Blue against Garry Kasparov, the game of Go has replaced chess as a test bed for research in artificial intelligence (AI). Go is one of the last board games where humans are still able to easily win against AI. Although there has been quite some research in the Go domain for 40 years, the progress in Computer Go has been slow. However, researchers have discovered new performing algorithms and computers are catching up really fast. Since 2006, when a new algorithm called Monte-Carlo Tree Search was proposed, the level of Go programs has improved drastically. The application 'MoGo TITAN', developed by INRIA France and Maastricht University, runs on the Dutch national supercomputer Huygens, which is one of the PRACE prototypes.
The French partners are Tao, INRIA, CNRS, LRI, Université Paris-Sud, Grid5000 with "top" contributors Jean-Baptiste Hoock, Arpad Rimmel and Olivier Teytaud. Top contributor for the Maastricht University was Guillaume Chaslot. Other contributors were Christophe Fiter, Sylvain Gelly, Julien Perez, Yizao Wang. The games were organized mainly by Chang-Shing Lee and MeiHui Wang, National University of Tainan (Taiwan).
Dr. Anwar Osseyran, SARA Managing Director: "This new milestone in AI research once again clearly demonstrates the great potential of Huygens in many non-traditional areas of usage of Supercomputing."
http://nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOA_7PLLJY_Eng
Received on Thu Mar 05 2009 - 11:06:47 IST