From: utzoo!decvax!ittvax!wexel
Newsgroups: net.games
Title: Re: Programming Go - (nf)
Article-I.D.: ittvax.590
Posted: Wed Jan 26 09:01:18 1983
Received: Fri Jan 28 06:44:00 1983
References: sri-unix.5061

There's an interesting story about that "guy at Stanford" who did a Go
program.  First of all, he is Bob(?) Ryder, the son of Robert Ryder,
ex-BTL, the first Yank to get a Japanese Pro Go rating.

Anyway, the Ryder, Jr. program was being debugged one night
at Stanford when Don Knuth came along and offered to try the
program out.  Since Knuth had but a rudimentary knowledge
of Go, the program, lousy as it was, creamed him, which allowed
Ryder to announce that his program was good enough to beat
Knuth.  This impressed many people.

This story was told to me as true.  I can't vouch for
its veracity.  When I called the program lousy, that reflects
the dire complexity of Go strategy, not the competence of Ryder.

The problem with Go is the difficulty of recognizing strategic
situations.  For those familiar with the terms, joseki is trivial,
fuseki is near impossible.  The book runs out early and you
are left with trying to recognize strategic significance of
stones very distant on the board and very distant in time
sequence of play.  The most trivial example of this is in 
playing ladders.  More advanced strategy adds orders of complexity.

The first dissertation on Go playing, by the way, was that of Dave Lefkowitz
at the Moore School, U.of P. in 1963(+-1).  I think the title was
"Strategic Pattern Recognition in the Game of Go."