computer-go: Preliminary report on 21st Century Cup competition

["Bob Myers" <rtm@xxxxxxx>]

Michael Reiss's Go4++ eked out a tie-break win over Ryuichi Kawa's
second-place Haruka to claim the Intelligent Go Foundation's first annual
21st Century Championship Cup and its US$5,000 prize.  Wulu, by Xiuyu Lei
and her team, and David Fotland's The Many Faces of Go finished third and
fourth.  Rounding out the top eight finishers were Anders Kierulf's SmartGo,
which was also awarded the Basis Technology New Star Prize; Ken Chen's Go
Intellect; Jimmy Lu's Go Star; and the Free Software Foundation's GNU Go
represented by Daniel Bump, in that order.  Other entrants in the strong
multinational 12-program field were Hiroshi Yamashita's Aya; Martin
Mueller's Explorer; Tristan Cazenave's GoLois; and William Harold Newman's
plodder.

In the Swiss-style tournament, directed by David Allen, Go4++ and Haruka
finished with identical 5-1 records and sum-of-opponents-scores, with Go4++
taking the championship on the strength of a better
sum-of-defeated-opponents-scores, based on its victory over Haruka in their
head-to-head match.

The competition was held on July 21 and 22nd on the campus of York College
in historic York, Pennsylvania, USA, in conjunction with the 17th US Go
Congress, which kindly arranged for facilities.

In addition to the competition itself, five authors gave lectures on their
programs and computer go topics during an informative Thursday afternoon
session.

Full details and game records, as well as some of the lecture notes, will be
available shortly on the Intelligent Go Foundation website.

--
Bob Myers