AI Milestone: Supercomputer Given 6/7 Stone Handicap Able To Win Professional 19X19 Go Games


At the Taiwan Open 2009 held in Taiwan from Feb. 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 set two new world records by winning a 19×19 competition with a 7-stones handicap against the 9P dan professional Go player Jun-Xun Zhou, and a 19×19 competition with a 6-stones handicap against the 1P dan professional Go player Li-Chen Chien.

Huygens, an IBM Power 575 Hydro-Cluster system, is the national supercomputer and located at SARA Computing and Networking Services in Amsterdam. The system, which is in production since August 2008, has a peak speed of 60 trillion calculations per second (Teraflop/s), 3328 Power6 processor cores at 4.7 GHz, a total memory capacity of more than 15 TB, and almost 1,000 TB disk capacity.

Go handicapping at wikipedia.

It is usually thought that the difference is only two or three stones between 1p and 9p, i.e., the difference is reduced to perhaps 1/3 stone per rank.

Computer Go at wikipedia

Go and mathematics at wikipedia.

Game complexity at wikipedia


Game Board size State-space Game-tree Avg game Complexity
complexity (log)complexity Length Class
Draughts 32 20 or 18 31 70 EXPTIME-complete
Chess 64 50 123 80 EXPTIME-complete
Go (19x19) 361 171 360 150 EXPTIME-complete

The game of Go at wikipedia

Go Ranks and ratings at wikipedia

The Prace Project site