Crazy Stone (software)

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Crazy Stone is a computer program that plays the Asian board game Go . It is one of the strongest programs of this genre on the market and scored several victories against Dan players. It was developed by the French computer scientist Rémi Coulom.

History and process

The history of Computer Go began in 1968 when game theorist Albert L. Zobrist developed software that beat absolute beginners in Go. Go is considered many times more complex than chess. Even the most powerful computers around 2010 were unable to produce a computational depth in order to plan a meaningful move in advance. Only machine learning processes with a much freer, non- deterministic approach to programming led to significantly better results. The breakthrough came with AlphaGo's victory over Lee Sedol , a top player. AlphaGo is not commercially available. It is based on machine learning and the Monte Carlo algorithm.

Like AlphaGo Master, Crazy Stone is also based on the automated study of numerous Go games. The trains themselves are statistically weighted using the Monte Carlo method. In principle, Crazy Stone continues to play several random games with the given starting position and then to the end in order to then present an optimal move. At each step of the trial run, the Monte Carlo branch search (MCTS) restricts the further search space, i.e. the number of possible subsequent moves.

Rémi Coulom has a background in programming computers with neural networks and developed an early version of Crazy Stone in 2006, already with pattern recognition , but without machine learning processes. In 2007 Crazy Stone won the Computer Go UEC Cup in Tokyo. In 2011 the first commercial version came out from the Japanese computer game distributor Unbalance and won several tournaments in a row against strong players. It is considered to be the most powerful computer go software one can buy in 2017. Competitors include Deep Zen and Leela , who use similar decision-making methods.

In addition to skill levels up to 7 Dan, Crazy Stone also offers an analysis of the position at any point in time. The program is available for Windows and as Champion Go for iOS and Android .

Some tournaments since 2010

  • March 21, 2016: 3rd place at the UEC Cup
  • March 3, 2015: 1st place at the UEC Cup
  • 2014: Victory against the 9-dan professional player Norimoto Yoda, with four handicap stones
  • 2013: Victory against the 9-dan professional player Yoshio Ishida, with four handicap stones
  • 2012: Double game against the 5-dan professional player Catalin Taranu at the European Go Congress . Crazy Stone won the first and lost the second game.
  • April 23, 2011: First win against a professional player on the KGS Go server (5 Dan)

Web link

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Albert L. Zobrist: A Model of Visual Organization for the Game of Go. Proceedings of the Spring Joint Computer Conference , 1969, Vol. 34, pp. 103-112.
  2. Alan Levinovitz: The Mystery of Go, the Ancient Game That computer Still Can not Win . In: WIRED . ( wired.com [accessed March 27, 2017]).