[Computer-go] News on Tromp-Cook ?

[Erik van der Werf]

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:37 PM, Jeff Nowakowski <jeff at dilacero.org> wrote:
>> In Computer Olympiad 2007, Steenvreter was gold medal on 9x9.
...
> Obviously it was following MoGo's lead with UCT (the tournament was held in
> June 2007, well after the remarkable success of MoGo). I don't mean to
> discredit Steenvreter, CrazyStone, or any other program. I'm just focusing
> on MoGo so much because it set the bar so high and got everybody chasing it.

Not exactly; I already knew UCT before MoGo even existed. Levente's
ecml paper was not the first one on UCT. He had already submitted
other work (*) where he specifically applied UCT to the domain of
computer games. At the time I was even considering to add UCT to Magog
and have a nice reunion at the 2006 Olympiad in Turin (my former
colleagues Levente Kocsis and Mark Winands were also co-authors of
Magog). Unfortunately then some conference organizer screwed up...


>> Mogo's biggest contributions, so far, in my view, are
>> 1.Applied UCT to computer Go, and such application came from the idea
>> "MCTS" that proposed in 2006 by Remi Coulom.

No, it came directly from Levente. Several people got access to his
paper around the same time as Remi's paper. It is more like they
independently proposed similar ideas.

Erik


* "Improved Monte-Carlo Search" by Levente Kocsis, Csaba Szepesvári
and Jan Willemson