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Move Evaluation in Go Using Deep Convolutional Neural Networks (arxiv.org)
10 points by jhartmann on Feb 18, 2015 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: A deep network trained on professional games learns to pick Go moves straight from the board, instead of searching ahead. With no search at all it beat the standard search program GnuGo in 97% of games and matched a top search program.

Abstract

The game of Go is more challenging than other board games, due to the difficulty of constructing a position or move evaluation function. In this paper we investigate whether deep convolutional networks can be used to directly represent and learn this knowledge. We train a large 12-layer convolutional neural network by supervised learning from a database of human professional games. The network correctly predicts the expert move in 55% of positions, equalling the accuracy of a 6 dan human player. When the trained convolutional network was used directly to play games of Go, without any search, it beat the traditional search program GnuGo in 97% of games, and matched the performance of a state-of-the-art Monte-Carlo tree search that simulates a million positions per move.

Chris J. Maddison, Aja Huang, Ilya Sutskever, David Silver
arXiv:1412.6564 · cs.LG, cs.NE · submitted Dec 20, 2014 · updated Apr 10, 2015
abstract · pdf · html · Minor edits and included captures in Figure 2

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This is very interesting, they have trained a 12 layer network to play Go, and that does quite well by itself. They also have built an asynchronous Monte-Carlo search + Neural Network implementation as a proof of concept. More awesome stuff out of the Google DeepMind and Google Brain groups.