Evolution of a Go program

About the development of Moyo Go Studio, software to (help) play the Oriental game of Go. Go is a two-player zero-sum game of perfect information. It is considered much harder than Chess. Currently, in spite of enormous effort expended, no computer program plays it above the level of a beginner.

Tuesday, January 10, 2006

Dizzy

I am working on the last part of the Fuseki module (the harvested Fuseki data is already downloadable in the form of the latest database downloads, and the current auto-update of Moyo Go adds Fuseki data to both the old and the new databases). I have been dizzy all day due to change of antibiotics, so things go slow. The light may also be a factor, I put in those energy-saving types that generate a lot of light. To fight winter depression here in Oslo. I worked a bit on the website. The ads that Sensei's Library refused are now here & there, some in this blog.

If people want to support me, feel free to put such an ad with a link to my site. That might offset the balance a little, as I will not get linked by GoBase and neither does Sensei's Library allow me to put ads there. AGA won't publish a review and no dealer wants to retail it. Perhaps it will help me fight back, at least get a decent Google pagerank.

I was thinking about the future genetic programming part of Moyo Go. Of course, merely evolving domain knowledge is not enough. This has to be done efficiently. So I found the solution for that: A Go-specific scripting language in which complex concepts can be represented with short "genomes", and where every possible genome encodes for a "legal" piece of Go-related executable code. I took ladder-finding as a testcase for this idea. Would it be possible to evolve ladder-finding code out of "nothing"? Yup! Easily, in fact, with this method.