The program was MoGo, <a href="http://www.lri.fr/~gelly/MoGo.htm">http://www.lri.fr/~gelly/MoGo.htm</a>, but I don't know anything about the "borrowed" hardware.<br>
Peter<br><br><div><span class="gmail_quote">On 8/8/08, <b class="gmail_sendername">Peter St. John</b> <<a href="mailto:peter.st.john@gmail.com">peter.st.john@gmail.com</a>> wrote:</span><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; padding-left: 1ex;">
The American Go Association (which has a free e-newsletter) at
<a href="http://www.usgo.org/" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)">http://www.usgo.org/</a> reports that a machine won an exhibition
game with a master last night at the US Go Congress. This isn't really
historic; the master, Myungwan Kim, is an 8 dan professional, and gave
9 handicap stones to the machine. <br>
<br>
Very roughly, 8 dan pro would be comparable to 9 dan amateur; and very
roughly, Kim would be able to give me 9 stones too (I'm 1 dan amateur
and amateur handicaps equate one stone to one rank, and the
mathematician Don Weiner 6d beats me easily at 6 stones, althugh I
should be able to cope at 5). <br>
<br>
9 stones is very roughly comparable to queen odds at chess, but the
statistical distributions of Go and Chess are not the same; a
Grandmaster of chess could maybe give me rook odds, not queen odds;
knight odds is roughly comparable to two standard deviations, a rating
difference of about 400 points, and I'm about 800 below the world
champion (and I"m comparable in go and chess). But again speaking
very roughly, this result is in the ballpark of achieving amateur 1 dan
status, about the level that Ken Thompson achieved with Belle in the
mid-80's (the first USCF Expert machine). Odds games in chess do not
have the same probabilistic qualities as in Go; we almost never play
odds games in chess anymore (it was popular for money in the 19th
century) but can't get along without handicapping in Go, games between
quite disparate players can be made interesting.<br>
<br>
I haven't found specifics for the machine or the team yet, but to quote the article:<br>
<br>
<font size="2">800 processors, at 4.7 Ghz, 15 Teraflops on borrowed supercomputers<br>
<br>
A related article said the machine(s) was sited in Europe.<br>
<br>
Peter<br>
</font>
</blockquote></div><br>