published on Wednesday, August 13, 2008

Dutch national supercomputer Huygens beats human Go professional

This is a joint press release of Maastricht University, NCF, NWO Physical Sciences and SARA

Amsterdam/Portland, August 13, 2008 - 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 dedicated help of the SARA staff, the Go application 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.”

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About the computer program MoGo
MoGo was initially developed in the framework of a M.Sc. project at the Ecole Polytechnique, near Paris, in 2006. By using a revolutionary algorithm, the programmers Sylvain Gelly and Yizao Wang were able to improve the program in such a way that the program is ranked number one on the 9x9 Computer Go Server since August 2006. In June 2007, MoGo extended its success by winning the 19x19 Go competition at the 12th Computer Olympiad in Amsterdam. MoGo is developed mainly by the French research organizations INRIA and CNRS. Since 2008 members of the Dutch research project GoForGo at Maastricht University, funded by NWO, are collaborating with the MoGo team.

About the Go professional
Kim MyungWan, the human player, was born in 1978, and became a Go professional at the age of 16. He improved very fast and is currently an 8 dan pro, which is nearly the best rank that can be reached (9 dan pro). In chess terms, he would be a top Grand Master (GM). Kim MyungWan participated in numerous international competitions, and won the US OPEN 2008, two days after the match against MoGo. See also: http://gobase.org/information/players/?pp=Kim+MyungHwan

About Maastricht University
Maastricht University is the youngest university in the Netherlands and is growing rapidly, with 11,500 students and 3, 000 staff. UM is known at home and abroad for its innovative education system, advanced research and international orientation. At Maastricht University, the AI research is concentrated in the Maastricht ICT Competence Centre (MICC).
www.unimaas.nl

Please contact Prof. Dr. Jaap van den Herik tel. +31 (0)43 3883477, email: herik@micc.unimaas.nl, or Guillaume Chaslot tel. +31 (0)43 3884803, email: G.Chaslot@micc.unimaas.nl, or Mark Winands, tel. +43 (0)43 3882728, email: m.winands@micc.unimaas.nl.

About NWO-NCF/EW
NCF is an independent foundation under the umbrella of the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO). NCF is responsible for the high-end computing infrastructure for science and public research in the Netherlands.
www.nwo.nl/ncf

Please contact Naomi Messing tel. +31 (0)70 3440526, email: messing@nwo.nl, or Peter Michielse tel. +31 (0)70 3440531, email: michielse@nwo.nl.

The NWO division 'Physical Sciences' (EW) strengthens the excellence of the scientific research environment in the disciplines of Astronomy, Mathematics and Computer Science.
www.nwo.nl/ew

Please contact Marjolein Schlarmann, tel. +31 (0)70 3440714, email: Schlarmann@nwo.nl.

About SARA
SARA Computing and Networking Services is the Dutch National Supercomputing and grid center and offers a complete package of advanced ICT services including high performance computing & visualization, high performance networking, grid and other e-Science services. SARA is one of the major European ICT supernodes and a Tier-1 center for CERN. The most eye-catching facilities at SARA are the National capacity and capability Supercomputers, the Network Operations Center of the academic high-bandwidth network SURFnet, the optical exchange point NetherLight which connects many National Research and Education Networks, and the first European Virtual Reality CAVE™.
www.sara.nl

Please contact Marina den Hartog tel. +31 (0)20 592 8009, email: m.den.hartog@sara.nl, Axel Berg, tel. +31 (0)20 592 3000, email: axel@sara.nl, or Walter Lioen, tel. +31 (0)20 592 3000, email: lioen@sara.nl.