INDUSTRY

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 Computing an Networking Services 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. Prof. Dr. Jaap van den Herik, Games and AI group, Maastricht University: “The current result forecasts that before 2020 a computer program will defeat the best human Go player on a 19x19 Go board in a regular match under normal tournament conditions. This is remarkable, since around 2000 it was generally believed that the game of Go was safe to any attack by a computer program. The 9-stones handicap victory casts severe doubts on this belief.” 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. Guillaume Chaslot, Ph.D. student at Maastricht University: “During the official match a quarter of the supercomputer, i.e. 800 processors – nearly 15 Teraflop/s – was used. This is the most powerful computer system ever used for playing a computer game, and 1000 times more powerful than the chess program Deep Blue. There was strong interest for the computer tournament. Many people were watching the game online.” System Huygens, an IBM Power 575 Hydro-Cluster system, is the new national supercomputer and located at SARA Computing and Networking Services in Amsterdam. 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 dedicate d help of the SARA staff, the Go app lication could run on the new system within a very short time. Dr. Anwar Osseyran, SARA Managing Director: “We were very happy that we could make the new national supercomputer Huygens available for scientists as from August 1, just before the Go Congress in Portland. This event was a unique opportunity to demonstrate the remarkable capabilities of this extremely powerful system for a broad audience. This shows that Huygens is also very suitable for a wide variety of problems that extend well beyond the so-called Beta scientific domain.” 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). Dr. Patrick Aerts, NCF Director: “This achievement is an outstanding result of NWO-financed scientific research, conducted on the NWO-funded national supercomputer. It also supports our vision that a truly general-purpose supercomputer can do a fantastic job on very special codes indeed. I am happy to see that this has worked out so well.”