I was in the KGS room for a couple of hours before the match and a couple after. I was very surprised by the result as many were.
There still is a lack of clear information about the event. For example, when Kim said that the computer plays at maybe 2 or 3 dan... does he mean professional or amateur pro? The supercomputer itself is unclear... some had said it would be 3000+ cores... for the game they said 800 processors. Some said it was indeed 3000+ cores.. because each processor was 4 core. But I never found a clear answer on this. The records of discussion are in MogoTitan's sgf records.. but the discussions in the computer go room and perhaps private rooms are not recorded (at least that I know of). If someone did give this information, it was very easy to lose track of when 500 people were observing the match. Tonight I am probably going to go through the records to see if any more information can be gleaned. One person who seemed to be in the room with Kim said that he was laughing and clapping at some of the computer's moves. One person in this list, but not the AGA eJournal, mentioned that Kim used about 11 minutes time.. where the computer used around 50. This was surprising to me... Kim is reported to say that he felt having extra time would not have helped. To me... this seems a little odd. He may have used it as a tactic to give the computer less thinking time (if Mogo was indeed thinking during Kim's turn). He also might have done this to show that the computer is quite a bit weaker than him. It is really hard to tell what really happened without a good report on the event. AGA eJournal has been pretty vague about information so far.. the clapping and laughing indicates that Kim enjoyed playing the computer and my feeling from what I have seen so far is that he was not playing the computer as if he was playing a professional tournament. Anyway.. it was a huge event. It's almost like the first computer to reach shodan amateur (not exactly.. but in a way). My information about Mogo is pretty light... but it seems that there is a chance that one day.. the source will be opened up. This is completely a guess and I don't wish to spread false info... but Mogo appears to have been a grad student's work.. and when they finished their degree.. they passed the source onto other researchers at their university. I am not able to find the text that I am thinking about... but there was a sentence to the tune of "the source code is not available yet" and one of the big guys that was behind this event seems to have feelings the GNU is great and that source should be available (in general). I do however feel that they have worked hard and have had a big success... so they do deserve to have an edge at the moment.. as long as the source is given out eventually. I am particularly interested in what they did to make it scale well to many nodes. So congrats to the Mogo team and here is to a nice outlook for the future of computer go :)
_______________________________________________ computer-go mailing list computer-go@computer-go.org http://www.computer-go.org/mailman/listinfo/computer-go/