United States Championship 1989
10 programs participated in this year's (89) United States Championship.
There weren't too many surprises in the finishing order. Two strong European
programs entered but were not eligible to qualify for the international
tournament in Taiwan.
Place N.A.Place Program Author Record
1 1 Go Intellect K. Chen 4-0
2 - MicroGo 2 A. Scarff 3-1
3 2 Cosmos D. Fotland 3-1
4 - Star of Poland J. Kraszek 3-1
5 3 Nemesis B. Wilcox 2-2
6 4 Poka H. Landman 2-2
7 5 Golem H. Enderton 1-3
8 6 Contender L. Beus 1-3
9 7 Go Guru K. Schatten 1-3
10 8 Tsunami B. Ladendorf 0-4
Go Intellect is the next generation of Go Explorer. It is much stronger.
Opinions of GI's strength ranged from 12 kyu to 5 kyu, with most people
saying 8 to 10. Go Explorer is generally considered to be 12 to 14 kyu, so
this is a large improvement in one year.
MicroGo 2 finally did fairly well, surprising many observers. Alan Scarff
was the only person who thought it had a reasonable chance against Go
Intellect in their 4th round match. Alan has said that the program uses
cellular automaton techniques, but he hasn't explained how yet.
Cosmos qualified as expected, beating Nemesis as expected. There was a
little excitement in the 4th round, when Poka got paired with Cosmos, which
should have been a sure win for Cosmos. However, due to some kind of bug,
Cosmos started moving slower and slower, and got into serious time trouble.
Dave Fotland finally had to kill it and re-enter the moves by hand. (Maybe
he'll implement auto-save or a trickle file now?) Eventually he got Cosmos
back in sync and completed the game, but another 5 minutes and it would
have been disqualified.
Star Of Poland placed about as expected. The 2nd round game between MicroGo
and SOP was very difficult, with a large capturing race that MicroGo won.
Nemesis lost to the stronger programs and beat the weaker programs. So did
Poka. It is unfortunate that Nemesis and Poka were never paired, since it
would have been an interesting game. As it turned out, the 4th round match
between the two worst programs (Go Guru and Tsunami) decided the 3rd place
by tie-breaker (sum-of-defeated-opponent's-scores).
Golem is basically the same program that competed in the USENIX tournament
in 1987. It is tactically very strong, but weak elsewhere.
Contender is a several-rank improvement of Infinity Go, but that still leaves
it around 23 to 25 kyu.
Go Guru and Tsunami are very young programs, and were not able to stand up to
any of the more mature ones. I expect that these could improve dramatically
in a year.
Except for the Cosmos time problem and one glitch in another program,
there were no crashes this year. All games were considered completed.
This contrasts with last year, where only 5 programs were entered and
the two that didn't qualify both crashed alot.
Howard A. Landman
landman@sun.com