Details of Program: Zen

Programmers:

Written by: Yamato & Kato, Hideki

General:

Uses Monte Carlo methods. Began playing on KGS (as 'Zen19') on March 26th and soon established a 2-dan rating there, running on a four-core AMD Opteron.

Zen is similar to partly MoGo, partly Crazy Stone. It has shape patterns that are generated by a minorization-maximization algorithm like Crazy Stone. But they are directly combined with UCT, without progressive widening. Probably the most original part of Zen is in the playout. The author does not think MC simulations must be always fast, so it has a lot of hard-coded Go knowledge.

Versions:

Tencho no Igo

DeepZen