The 52nd European Go Congress will be held in Leksand, Sweden, from July 26th to August 9th 2008. Both Wednesdays will be "rest days" from the main tournaments, with excursions arranged instead. Also on the second Wednesday, August 6th, there will be Computer Go events. This page is about those events. All the information here is, at present, provisional.

19×19 computer Go tournament  |  9×9 computer Go tournament  |  Lectures & talks on computer Go  |  Schedule

There will be a Computer Go tournament, on full boards. It will be similar in format to the Computer Go tournaments held monthly on KGS; and will be "held" on KGS, but the competing programs will be physically present at the EGC venue in Leksand, Sweden. They will communicate with KGS using its kgsGtp Java client.

Rules

• Swiss (or round robin, if there are fewer than six players)
• Chinese rules
• no handicaps
• 7½ komi
• absolute time, "sudden death"
• 30 minutes each (or 40 minutes, if the schedule allows)

Entrants may run their programs either on the computers provided by the sponsors, or on computers which they have brought themselves. The use of remote links is forbidden; this is to ensure that programs cannot receive human assistance. We now know the specification of the computers provided by the sponsors:

Dell Precision 390
Processor: Intel Core2 duo ["1.86GHz/1066MHz/4MB L2/Dual-core", don't ask me to explain all this]
Memory: 2Gb DDR2 533 Non ECC dual channel
Floppy drive: None
Hard drive: 80Gb Sata2, 3.0Gb/s with NCQ and 8MB DataBurst Cache
CD drive: 48X CDRW/DVD drive
Ports:"Eight USB 2.0", maybe five usable
OS: Windows Vista

These computers have Windows Vista installed; the organisers in Sweden have stated their intention of providing methods for programs requiring Linux and other operating systems to be able to compete as well.

Competing programs should support the GTP protocol, and KGS's "cleanup" commands. These are the same requrements as for the monthly tournaments on KGS – we recommend that your program should compete in at least one of those before competing in this event, to check that it supports the protocol correctly.

A program may be operated by its author, or by a person appointed by its author. If you cannot find a suitable operator, you can submit your program anyway, and I will do my best to assign it an operator. This person may be operating several other programs as well, so you should make his task as easy as possible, and assume no computer knowledge. Programs my be submitted by emailing them to me at maproom@gmail.com, or by snailmailing them (on CD or memory stick) to European Go Congress, c/o Martin Stiassny, Lissgattu 13, Hjulbäck 421, 79397 Siljansnäs, Sweden.

There is no entry fee for either of the computer Go events.

Prizes

Thanks to Toshiba Tec Nordic AB, there will be €300 in total prize money. €200 of this will be assigned to the 19×19 event. We propose to assign the prizes for the 19×19 event like this:

Registered players

* Wei2go will only play if this makes the numbers even.
House & Hafner's HouseBot, Guillaume Chaslot's Mango, Ivo Tonkes' TSGO, and Mika Urtela and others' Tuupari have withdrawn.

KGS page for the tournament

Results

There will also be a Computer Go tournament on 9×9. It will be the same as the 19×19 event, except that it will be held on 9×9 boards, with faster time limits.

Rules

• Swiss (or round robin, if there are fewer than six players)
• Chinese rules
• no handicaps
• 7½ komi
• absolute time, "sudden death"
• 15 minutes each

Prizes

Thanks to Toshiba Tec Nordic AB, there will be €300 in total prize money. €100 of this will be assigned to the 9×9 event. We propose to assign the prizes for the 9×9 event like this:

Registered players

House & Hafner's HouseBot, Guillaume Chaslot's Mango, Joakim Mjärdner's Toaster and Urtela, Nikula &, Aitakangas' Tuupari have withdrawn.

KGS page for the tournament

Results

After the computer Go tournament(s), there will be lectures on Go programming and Go algorithms by invited speakers.

Gunnar Farnebäck has agreed to speak. Proposed title: "Why is computer go suddenly improving so rapidly?"

Elwyn Berlekamp has sent a DVD of his talk "Mathematics and Go", which will be played to the audience.

Page last updated 2008-08-09.