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AMSTERDAM and PORTLAND, Oregon, August 14 /PRNewswire/ —

- This is a Joint Press Release of Maastricht University, NCF, NWO
Physical Sciences and SARA

At the 24th Annual Congress of the game Go, held in Portland, Oregon from
August 2-10, the brand-new Dutch supercomputer Huygens defeated a human Go
professional in an official match with a 9-stones handicap. It is the first
victory of a computer playing Go against a human being. The application ‘MoGo
Titan’, developed by INRIA France and Maastricht University, runs on the
national supercomputer which is located at SARA in Amsterdam.

After the victory of IBM’s Deep Blue against Garry Kasparov, the game of
Go has replaced chess as test bed for AI research. Although there has been
quite some research in the Go domain for 40 years, the progress in Computer
Go has been slow. The best programs played on a (weak) amateur level. All
kinds of AI techniques, which were able to produce good results in either
games or other application domains, failed to make an impact. Since 2006,
when a new algorithm called Monte-Carlo Tree Search was proposed, the level
of Go programs has improved drastically.

Blitz games

On August 5, before the “real game”, three blitz games where played with
various handicaps. Kim MyungWan was stronger than the computer at these blitz
games. So people were expecting the professional to win the non-blitz game.
This made the victory of the computer even more spectacular.

System

Huygens, an IBM Power 575 Hydro-Cluster system, is the new Dutch national
supercomputer. The system has a peak speed of 60 trillion calculations per
second (Teraflop/s), 3328 Power6 processor cores at 4.7 GHz, a total memory
capacity of more than 15 TB, and almost 1000 TB disk capacity. The complete
system has been in production since August 1 of this year. With the dedicated
help of the SARA staff, the Go application could run on the new system within
a very short time.

Financers

The research in this project has been financed through the GoForGo
project by the Physical Sciences council of the Netherlands Organisation for
Scientific Research (NWO), while the CPU hours of Huygens were granted by the
Netherlands National Computing Facilities Foundation (NCF).

More information:
http://www.sara.nl/news/press/20080813/Go_computer_victory_eng.html

Maastricht University, NCF, NWO Physical Sciences and SARA