Mind Sports Olympiad Computer Go Tournament Results

Monday August 21st and Tuesday August 22nd 2000, in the Alexandra Palace, London

The computer Go event in the Mind Sports Olympiad was played as a double round-robin, with each pair of programs playing twice, with colours reversed. Time limits were 60 minutes each, with no overtime. Chinese (area) rules were used. Komi was 6½ points.

The clear winner, with ten wins in ten rounds, was Professor Chen Zhixing's GoeMate. Dr. Michael Reiss's Go4++ was second - its only losses were to GoeMate, one of them by only half a point. Go4++ is sold as Go Professional 3. Hiroshi Yamashita's Aya was third, losing its games to GoeMate and to Go4++ and losing one game to Bruno Bouzy's Indigo.

In the results table below, each cell shows the results of the two games between the two programs - first is with the program of that row playing black.

Programmer	nationality	Program	GoeMate	Go4++	Aya	GoStar	Indigo	GoLois	Total wins	Prize medal
Chen, Zhixing	CN	GoeMate		1 1	1 1	1 1	1 1	1 1	10	Gold
Michael Reiss	UK	Go4++	0 0		1 1	1 1	1 1	1 1	8	Silver
Yamashita, Hiroshi	JP	Aya	0 0	0 0		1 0	1 1	1 1	5	Bronze
Lu, Jinqiang	CN	GoStar	0 0	0 0	1 0		1 0	1 1	4
Bruno Bouzy	FR	Indigo	0 0	0 0	0 0	1 0		1 1	3
Tristan Cazenave	FR	GoLois	0 0	0 0	0 0	0 0	0 0		0

Tristan Cazenove's GoLois lost all its games, despite achieving several won positions. It was running on a laptop computer, which seemed underpowered for this program, and it spent a lot of time on memory paging. It was programmed to keep within the time limit by speeding up, and playing much worse, when it had only twenty minutes remaining. Given more time, a faster processor, or more memory, I think it would have scored much better.

Zip of all games sgf format [1] and Zip of all games ishi format [2].

[3]
foreground: Lu, Jinqiang author of GoStar
background: Chen, Zhixing author of the gold medal winner, GoeMate

[4]
centre: Michael Reiss author of the silver medal winner, Go4++
right: Tristan Cazenave author of GoLois