24 ms·
Crazy Stone computer Go program defeats Ishida Yoshio 9 dan with 4 stones
- sp332 13y agoA note from near the bottom: For the benefit of readers who aren’t necessarily Go players, a four stone handicap means that black (the computer) was allowed to place four stones on the board before white (Ishida) made any moves. This may sound like a lot but, while it is a significant handicap, it’s not really as big as it sounds.
- awwducks 13y agoIn my estimation (I play go), beating Ishida Yoshio at 4 stones in a non-simul game [1] probably requires a player that's at least 4 dan amateur. [1] Professionals usually play amateurs simultaneous games. That is, 1 vs. many. The quality of play improves dramatically if they are playing a single game. In this case, a single game Ishida probably wanted to win.
- CocaKoala 13y agoyeah; there are some people in the comments suggesting that that Ishida might not be playing at the level of a top 9p right now, but this is still pretty significant and a very impressive feat.
- awwducks 13y agoYep. The difference between Ishida and a top pro today probably isn't more than 2 stones.
- hyperpape 13y agoEven that is probably high. I think any professional in the world could lose on 5 stones (c.f. http://www.computer-go.info/h-c/index.html http://www.computer-go.info/h-c/index.html).
- MichaelGG 13y agoI was under the impression that the difference between nearly all pros is 3 stones or less.
- hyperpape 13y agoProbably accurate for active professionals in the big three countries, and probably a bit generous. I doubt there are many professionals, if any, who need three stones against the best. In fact, top western amateurs might be competitive on three stones. There has been some compression of professional strength in the past 50 years, so there may be some older professionals who need that much. Additionally, there are players with professional ranks who no longer compete, or only compete in Western tournaments. They may need three stones.
- T-hawk 13y agoWould it be accurate to say those 4 stones are about equivalent to one pawn in chess? As a back-of-the-envelope calculation, one pawn is 1/43 of your starting material in chess if the king is included as a four-point fighting piece. Four stones in Go comes to 1/45 of your expected endgame material as half of a 19x19 board.
- visarga 13y agostrength difference between pro 1 dan and pro 9 dan is only about 2 stones
- CocaKoala 13y agoIt's hard to make a comparison like that because Go and Chess operate on fundamentally different models. Chess is about capturing a specific piece and putting your opponent in a position where they have no options but to lose; to that end, it's a war of attrition where players slowly lose resources until the game is over (note that I do not play chess at any significant level). In contrast, Go is about capturing territory by fencing it in. Placing four stones on the board is like placing four free fenceposts; you can't really call it a tangible resource like a pawn, but it gives you more of a structure and gives you some influence over the rest of the board. It's possible to remove resources from your opponent in go, since you can surround pieces and capture them. But it's not really an attrition thing like in chess; it's more about territory and control. Trying to make it a numbers game and saying "four stones is 1/45 of your expected endgame material" isn't really relevant to go, because the position of the stones matters so much more than the number. If you have four more pawns than your opponent in a game of chess, that's pretty clearly an advantage; if you have four stones in a totally useless area of the board, or four stones in a really useless configuration, then they're not helpful at all.
- gcp 13y agoIt's hard to make a comparison like that because Go and Chess operate on fundamentally different models It is very easy. The nature of the game is completely irrelevant. The question is what expectation of winning rate a 4 stone advantage gives to a Go player. For middle ranks, one stone is about 100 ELO-equivalent, or 64% winning rate. (I think it's closer at top dan ranks, would have to look up the statistics). 4 Stones is about 92% chance of winning between equal players. The equivalent in chess is slightly more than 4 pawns advantage, or about a minor piece.
- awwducks 13y agoHere is Crazy Stone's account on KGS (a reasonably popular go server). http://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=crazystone http://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=crazystone That AI is 6d on KGS.
- mVChr 13y agoAnd just for a comparison, here's the graph for a popular long-time KGS player, currently ranked #79 in the KGS top 100 players: http://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=twoeye http://www.gokgs.com/graphPage.jsp?user=twoeye CrazyStone isn't too far behind.
- javanix 13y agoOn a semi-unrelated note, is there a decent English-speaking online Go community anywhere? I would like to try my hand at playing but I can't find anything along the lines of FICS, or even a decent-looking client for Android.
- hyperpape 13y agowww.gokgs.com is the server that's probably biggest in the English speaking world. The desktop client is Java based, there is an Android client, and we're waiting for an HTML client (it's in closed Alpha). There are several other servers that cater more to Asian players, but you can certainly play on them. There is also online-go.com, which is web-based. It has real-time games, but the majority of games on the server are correspondance. Resources: senseis.xmp.net (an old wiki that has lots of content, but few active contributors), and lifein19x19.com/forum, a forum dedicated to Go.
- RBerenguel 13y agoDidn't know you were in HN :D Hi!
- mVChr 13y agoI didn't know about the KGS HTML client. Either I should hurry up with my side-project or abandon it, as that's exactly what I'm building (but obviously without the already established KGS user base).
- hyperpape 13y agoThere are sporadic reports about development on the KGS account for Google+.
- thesteamboat 13y agoKGS is the usual recommendation. Also check out Sensei's library as a learning resource. http://www.gokgs.com http://www.gokgs.com
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- ChuckMcM 13y agoWow, I was not aware that Go programs had gotten this good. That is excellent news. No a bunch of new papers to add to my list to read.
- visarga 13y agoCrazy Stone got 4 stones handicap, I think. It wasn't a level playing field yet.
- cruise02 13y agoThat's still significant progress in the past five years. 2009 was the first time AIs were able to reach dan level ranks on a 19x19 board. Crazy Stone is approximately 6 dan now.
- mark_l_watson 13y agoI have played (in the 1970s) both the Women's World Champion and the National champion of South Korea - I am not going to admit how many stones they gave me and they still won :-) Four stones is sort of like giving a child a knight off the board starting advantage in chess. BTW, my older brother taught me Go when I was eight. We played fairly equally for many years, then suddenly within a one year period I was able to give him nine stones, a handicap I have now been giving him for decades. Not saying I am good, just that my brother is a bad Go player :-)
- dragontamer 13y agoA few years ago, it was impossible for a computer to beat a pro with a 9-stone handicap. This is a major advancement for Go AI, no matter how you slice it.
- awwducks 13y agoAbsolutely. A few years ago, even I, a low amateur dan, was able to beat the strongest AIs with the computer taking 9 stones.
- mcv 13y ago
- hyh1048576 13y agoThis news is about exactly one year old. Is there another game coming? (Edit: I found the 7th game here: http://jsb.cs.uec.ac.jp/~igo/eng/ http://jsb.cs.uec.ac.jp/~igo/eng/, it has passed, but I can't find the result.)
- valarauca1 13y agoTo put in more westernized chess terms, this would be like beating a 2100Elo master without bishops. Yoshio is a professional and very skilled, but he hasn't won a major tourniquet since 1989. Really not an achievement, its nice to see Computer Go advancing. A 4 stone handicap between master's is massive. The difference between a 9d (dan) and 1d isn't actually 8 stones. With an 8 stone handicap a 1d will play a 9d off the board (provided both are profession dans not amateur). Source http://www.amazon.com/Kages-Secret-Chronicles-Handicap-Go/dp/0870403869 http://www.amazon.com/Kages-Secret-Chronicles-Handicap-Go/dp... Generally I would say that this should put it around US 2-4d (for US Go Association, or KGS online). Maybe 2k-1d in professional amateur circles. I doubt it work warrant a 1-3p 'professional ranking'.
- cruise02 13y agoA four stone handicap in Go is way less than a four piece handicap in chess. Also, Crazy Stone is 6d on KGS.
- valarauca1 13y agoTrue I edited it down to just bishops. And KGS is very inflated, a 6d on KGS vs. a 6d international professional wouldn't be contest. The normal conversion I hear is a 3d on KGS is around a 1k on Eastern Servers. Or that's my experience for people who play on KGS and eastern servers. I'm a 4k on KGS, but I know my knowledge is a bit amateur or a South Korean 4k.
- mark_l_watson 13y agoNice! I spent a lot of free time in the late 1970s and early 1980s working on my Go playing program Honninbo Warrior (played poorly, but was the first commercial Go playing product). The new Monte Carlo search technique (used by Crazy Stone) basically blows all previous approaches out of the water. I bought the "Championship Go" app for my android phone, it uses Monte Carlo, and plays well.
- gcp 13y agoMonte Carlo for Go was known for a long time. It wasn't until someone (not-so-coincidentally, the author of Crazy Stone) figured out a way to combine it with tree search and published his research, that performance began to skyrocket.
- cjbprime 13y agoIf anyone would like more background, I have a previous blog post -- "Computers are very good at the game of Go": http://blog.printf.net/articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-very-good-at-the-game-of-go/ http://blog.printf.net/articles/2012/02/23/computers-are-ver...
- famousactress 13y agoDamnit! I'd finally gotten used to the disappointment that kept coming from expecting to click through a link and read about a game but instead landing in an article about a programming language. Now I just feel like I'm being punk'd.
- thinkpad20 13y agoCombinatorically, Go is considered pretty much the most complex game in existence, and computer go programs have been historically weak, so this seems to be quite an achievement (despite that it was against 4-stone-handicapped master passed his prime). One thing I wonder, though, if computers ever catch up to humans at Go, could we simply expand the board size a few spaces, thus dramatically increasing the problem space and setting computers back a while? I guess that would depend on what kind of techniques were being used by the computers to solve the games.
- rememberlenny 13y agoInteresting question. As a go lover I believe it would hinder the person more than the computer. You wouldn't be able to expand the board, because then its no longer Go. There are three commonly used board sizes (9x9, 13x13, and 19x19). Other than that, it wouldn't be Go. The computer would have an easier time playing with a larger board because its algorithmically making moves. The experience go player wouldn't have their experience behind them.
- gcp 13y agoSome go programs (e.g. Leela) support playing on large boards, up to 37x37. Algorithmically, there are two issues: Go programs use Monte Carlo estimation by doing semi-random playouts to determine the game theoretic value of a position. The longer the game is from its end, the more noise in the estimate, which worsens the playing strength. Secondly, the longer the game is from its end, the longer the computation of a playout takes, which reduces the number of positions that can be considered in the tree search part. So in fact, no, moving up in board size does hurt the program substantially. Experience with programs like the above shows it hurts the computer more than the human.
- thinkpad20 13y agoYeah, this is my thought. It seems, for example, that precisely calculating the optimal strategy would be quite tenable on a 9x9 board, because the problem space is so small. On a 19x19 board, the space is absolutely immense. It doesn't seem to make a huge difference with humans, though, because we are so adept at pattern-matching. So it seems like while a larger board would certainly make things more difficult to a human, they wouldn't really have to make many adjustments in their fundamental strategy. On the other hand, it could dramatically weaken a computer player. As to the other point raised, there doesn't seem to be any reason why it would suddenly cease to become Go if you increase the board past 19x19. The rules of Go are independent of board size, and I'm sure it took quite a long time before the "standard sizes" of 9, 13, and 19 were fixed.
- aalpbalkan 13y agoTook me a while to realize the program actually isn't written in Go.
- 89vision 13y agoconfusing title, I was expecting golang
- billforsternz 13y agoNot confusing at all. Go laid claim to the name hundreds of years ago, and the title made it clear it was the game. If someone invented a computer language called chess and there was an article title "Houdini computer chess program defeats former world champion Garry Kasparov with knight handicap" would you expect it to be about the computer language ?
- CocaKoala 13y agoAlso, the source for the article is "gogameguru", which would be a bit of a head-scratching place for an article about golang.
- apetresc 13y agoNow you know how all of us Go players have been feeling for the last four years.
- gcp 13y agoThe dread of trying to Google anything based on the presence of the term "go".
- yetanotherphd 13y agoThat's unfortunate. Have you considered renaming the game to gogame?
- apw 13y agoFor those looking for some details behind how Crazy Stone actually works, this set of slides may help: http://remi.coulom.free.fr/JFFoS/JFFoS.pdf http://remi.coulom.free.fr/JFFoS/JFFoS.pdf
- unix-dude 13y agoSomeone should implement this in Go :)
- username42 13y agoI can play go (I am 1kyu). The game against crazy stones is really impressive. I feel that Ishida played at his best level against crazy stones and that crazy stones would not have won if it hasn't found the marvellous move 52. In the game against zen, I feel the level was lower. The handicap of 4 stones seems to be very accurate. This means that crazy stones has the same level than top amateur players. Generally, in Go, fast games are an advantage for computer. I wonder what would give a slower game. congratulation to crazy stones.
- mcv 13y agoCool. Computer go has come a long way since the days I still played regularly. Back then I could still defeat the strongest go computer. There's clearly no chance of that ever happening again.