Editable RGG FAQ Part 6 Section 3
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6.3: How strong are computers?
It is a surprise to most people that there is no software available today which can beat an average level human player.
The level of play of the strongest playing software today is estimated at around 8 Kyu (and even this is heavily contested; see for instance an interesting analysis by David MECHNER).
The main reason for this is said to be that it is difficult to estimate the value of a given move. This makes it difficult to program a routine which can choose the 'best' move. The true value of a move may not become apparent until 30 plays later in local fights, and sometimes literally 100 plays later, for endgame optimisation moves.
Another reason is that, because of the large playing area and the simple rules, there is always a very large number of legal moves which are even reasonably plausible moves. This results in a very large game tree if 'dumb' search algorithms are used.
Considerable resources are going and have gone into the development of strong programs.
For those who are interested in the subject, there are various places to start a search:
IntelligentGo
Michael REISS
Jan van der STEENs computer section
David MECHNER
Smart-games
ComputerGoBulletin
Markus Enzenberger's Online Computer Go Bibliography
If you are interested in computer go you may want to join the computer go mailing list. The computer go mailing list was established in Feb 93 to discuss programming computers to play Go. The volume of mail on this list is rather low, but sometimes goes up in bursts.