About thirty years ago I became addicted to the game of Go. It was quite hard to find anyone to play with; for some reason women – especially not middle-aged women friends of mine - did not seem very interested, but fortunately several of the young men around were willing to indulge me sometimes. Then I got hold of a primitive computer version, but that moved too fast for me – it had made its move before I could even look up at the screen after making my own move, without even helpfully indicating where, with a flashing light. So I gradually lost interest.
My interest was renewed when I read recently that, although Deep Blue can play a fair game of chess, & Watson can win a game of Jeopardy, computers are nowhere near beating a human at a game of Go.
One small step has been taken through the application of network theory, which has been able to make some progress with the analysis small scale patterns over an area of just 9 of the intersections (on a board which has 19x19 squares).
And guess what – our old friend Zipf’s law comes into play.
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