Re: Computers and games

Hal Finney (hal@rain.org)
Wed, 20 Aug 1997 12:02:21 -0700

John Clark writes:
> When a computer became the world Chess champion a few months ago the
> apologists for biological brains were saying there were plenty of other games
> where humans still had a commanding lead, the two most common examples given
> were Go and Othello. Last week a computer beat Takeshi Murakami, the world
> Othello champion, 6 games in a row. Any bets on how long Go will hold out?

The Foresight Exchange on-line betting game (based on Robin Hanson's Idea
Futures) has a betting claim on whether a computer will become the Go
champion before the year 2020. Current odds are running at about a 60%
chance of it happening by then. So the consensus of the players would
seem to be that this is not likely to happen soon (since surely the
computers of 2020 will be much more powerful than those of today, plus
progress in AI should give the computers a software edge by then as well).

http://www.ideosphere.com/fx-bin/Claim?claim=GoCh

Hal