American Go E-Journal

Computer go has improved dramatically in recent years, For instance, a program named “Zen” recently earned a rating of KGS 4D by playing 83 games in 24 hours at that rating, and winning 60 of them. Peter Shotwell (l) has written about computer go for years, and covers all the latest advances in a thorough update of his article available from The Bob High Memorial Library, entitled, “A Time Line of Supercomputer Go: Temporal Difference Learning to Monte Carlo Programming.”  Also available are two appendices featuring interviews with some of the more prominent programmers. Shotwell also joined the critical reaction to Henry Kissinger’s recent use of go principles to explain Chinese thinking, posting “Thoughts on the Relationship of Go to On China by Henry Kissinger and The Protracted Game by Scott Boorman,” arguing in detail that neither of the books contribute much towards understanding the basic differences between Eastern and Western history, thinking and language that are the roots of the differences in strategic outlooks, both past and present.
– Roy Laird