It remains the one game that humans still easily crush machines.

It's interesting that this popular statement is becoming less and less true, and seems likely to totally cease being a selling point (to the extent that it ever has been) in the nearish future. Perhaps it will turn out to have been really important, and everyone will migrate to some large board arimaa variant

I keep seeing people refer to Go as the game where a beginner can crush the strongest programs!

I wouldn't be surprised if this puts a lot of early players off the game. GnuGo is no pushover on even its easiest level. I can imagine a lot of players play some 9x9, try against GnuGo on 19x19, get completely crushed, infer that they have no talent for the game, and don't bother again.

There seems no point to playing chess against the computer at all, knowing that programs can beat even the best players.

Which bot is 6d?

There seems no point to playing chess against the computer at all, knowing that programs can beat even the best players.

At 16:10 he shows a supposedly ended position where Black can capture a single stone on the boundary of White's territory.

He talks about problems ending the game and agreement, but seems ignorant of the easy solution using area scoring. He claims computers have a hard time ending the game or counting, but a computer will happily win by 1 point, something that used to be a pro trick.

I'm interested in the background of the talk - can Peter tell us what the event was, or why Joseph was presenting the talk?

BACON is a conference on things developers love. Thirty-one tasty sessions on topics including rocketry, Go, infinity, data visualisation, and continuous deployment.

I'm interested in the background of the talk - can Peter tell us what the event was, or why Joseph was presenting the talk?

I'll admit i didn't watch the talk (since several here said to save the time), but for new comers (and relative to other games) ending the game is quite challenging regardless of ruleset. Go ends only when players agree the game is over...that's a little crazy when you think about it. Imagine if in chess your opponent kept making moves well after checkmate, or in backgammon if you kept rolling even though all of your opponents pieces were off of the board, simply because you didn't agree you had lost yet.

Out here in Eugene, we just had the Oregon Asian Celebration. I think I've done more teaching in the last 2 days than I've done in the last year.

I noticed the following:

1) Teaching territory scoring was useless except in the case of the die-hards (The people who were REALLY interested in the game anyway, and who would wade through any number of obstacles to get there). Every time I tried to introduce it to a more casual player, you'd see the wheels in their head start spinning really fast, and then stall. I'd have to work harder then to get them through it, and it took precious time from teaching more people.

2) Teaching area scoring resulted in near-immediate games of go. The definition of territory was simple, and I'd just say "See this, this is territory, if anyone gets inside, you have the backup from these surrounding stones to go in there and finish them off"

I never had to explain "Oh, well you shouldn't play in there, because you make your territory smaller, you should just know those can be killed"

Instead, I got to say "You shouldn't play in there, those guys can't escape, you can kill them later if you want to, Go out! Explore! Be Bold!"

3) The counting step did require some additional assistance, but at least they GOT to the counting step. They satisfied themselves to the idea that there was nothing left to be gained and were willing to pass. That's less obvious in territory scoring.

The game still ends by agreement under area scoring.

Beginners are capable of making ridiculous mistakes about when to agree to end the game that have nothing to do with the difference between territory and area, so claiming that the answer is obvious under one rule set but not the others is hyperbole.