Promoting Go in the UK and beyond

Writing a program that plays Go well is harder than you might think. Even programming a computer to make legal moves is not trivial. Whereas there are Chess programs that can challenge the world Chess champion, the best available Go program can be beaten very easily by anyone with an amateur dan grade.

For years, if you succeeded in writing a Go-playing program than could beat a novice professional, you could win a prize worth over US $1,000,000. Nobody did this before the prize expired in 2000. Of course the commercial value of such a program would be at least that.

The Intelligent Go Foundation, run by Bob Myers, is a non-profit organization devoted to the promotion of computer Go.

There is also a lot on the subject on Mick Reiss's go page.

This site has some trivial but important advice for would-be Go programmers.

We also have links to results of past computer Go tournaments, and a list of future computer Go tournaments.

The Computer Go Mailing List is for public email discussions of issues of Go programming. You can join it or read its archive.

Ingo Althofer is working with "3-hirns", which comprise two different programs and a person or program which chooses between the two moves they select. See his website.

If you plan to write your own Go-playing program for Windows, Linux, or Unix, you may be able to save yourself some work by using the workbench material provided by OpenGo.

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