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A French-built supercomputer beat a 5 dan Go master in France a couple weeks ago.  Go is a game I became very interested in in January 2007.  I played several thousand games between then and a month ago, when I deleted my account on an online turn-based Go server.  My reason for quitting was that it was taking too much time I should be using for studying, and I was letting it frustrate me too much.  Go is a game that requires mental peace.  You know how when you became a Jedi, you had to let go of your anger?  Same helps for Go.  I’ll take it back up again at some point, because it is a great mental exercise, but my obsession was just becoming too great.

The reason I picked up Go in the first place was that it remained outside the reach of computers.  Of course, it was only a matter of time before it too fell.  And actually, it hasn’t yet.  Just because it beat a 5 dan French master, doesn’t mean it can beat a 9 dan master from China.  So we’ll see.

The method this system used to beat said master was a Monte Carlo method.  These are brilliantly simple in theory.  You basically generate a multitude of random games for a set of moves and score each resulting game state.  The next move with the best scoring set of random game states is chosen.  This can also be thought of as voting.  A set of random models each vote for a move.  The most (or strongest) votes win.  And when 10,000 monkeys agree…