News & Computer Go

British Go Journal No. 63. November 1984. Page 16.

Black: Microgo1, 15k?
White: A 3kyu, 3k
Four stones
The game-file in SGF format.

The winner of this year's Acornsoft computer tournament will apparently be marketed soon, and a similar tournament is to be held next summer, but in the meantime another commercial programme has appeared which, from what we have seen of it, seems to be quite a bit stronger than any of the contenders in the tournament.

It is called Microgo1, and is produced by Allan Scarff. Available now for the Electron and BBC micros, he hopes to have Commodore and Spectrum versions available shortly. The programme uses some high level artificial intelligence concepts, and hardly uses tree searches or lookahead methods at all, but it plays go which looks remarkably like that played by a human of around 15kyu.

Allan is an ambitious man, and if a quarter of his plans for selling this programme are realised we should expect a doubling of the British Go playing population within a year. (BGJ listed a sales address.) For those who want to see it in action first we present here a game in which it takes four stones from a 3 kyu. (It only plays on a 9*9 board.)

Figure 1