“A recent victory for a program called ‘Zen’ — which last month beat a highly ranked amateur player from Taiwan — has the Go programmer community buzzing,” reported Benjamin Carlson in the July 31 edition of The Daily. Carlson notes that “In games ranging from chess to ‘Jeopardy!’ powerful computers are making short work of human champions — with one notable exception.” “Can this be a turning point in the history of Go?” asked Zen co-creator Hideki Kato in a Go forum after the victorious results. The “Go bot” story — which discusses recent advances in go and AI through Monte Carlo Tree Search — goes on to quote Jie Li 7D, who calls go “one of the most artistic board games” as well as go programmer David Fotland, who says ““It’s so hard to look at a position and figure out who is winning.”
