The really unnerving thing is that they've improved 9 stones in only a year. One of the biggest criticisms of Kurzweil was that the software would never improve fast enough to match the improvement in hardware, but we see here that this program is able to beat dans by using a slightly modified version of guess-and-check.
How much of that is just due to attention? Not being an expert, my assumption would be that we're just seeing the effect of chess software getting boring (no more people to beat) and the supercomputer games folks moving on to greener pastures.
Not much. Go is a fundamentally harder game to play than Chess, by several orders of magnitude. Unlike chess, where the next move set is large but fairly constrained, every turn in go can let you move (nearly) anywhere that hasn't already been moved to.
What's more, go players frequently make moves that to the uninitiated seem like "running away", which is to say not playing near areas of contention. These are placed in moments of low vulnerability so that eventually the player can build towards them. Seldom do even experienced go players know every move that will lead up to connecting with these distant stones, but they know they lend strength to that area and thats a place where they see potential for future moves.
As such, traditional AI game techniques really haven't scaled well to Go. It's only recently that we've began to use huge sums of hardware just to make it play go at a level that most would consider to be an experienced amateur.
It seems like Go is a more recognition-based problem, so we'll have to see if Jeff Hawkin's work might show some progress there once they get their work off the ground.
It's more that the MoGo folks have finally developed an algorithm which is appropriate to Go. Their monte-carlo-based strategies scale well in Go, whereas the alpha-beta-style chess-like algorithms do not scale well. I don't think there are any people involved who used to work on chess who now work on Go.
I've always thought that this criticism didn't make sense. Improvements in software are highly dependent on improvements in hardware:
http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html
What would have once taken incredible software engineering skills is now trivial. Hardware is a big constraint on software development. How can you possibly expect software and hardware development to be neck and neck?
But maybe it's a good thing we don't have to churn butter anymore, right? Improvements in technology mean that we don't have to deal with the low level stuff that's been done a million times before, allowing us to focus on high level stuff that nobody's done.
Maybe in the general case (i.e, most software development), but in the special case (i.e, high performance computing, which this falls under), more powerful hardware begets more powerful software.
Oops, sorry I deleted my comment because I didn't think it added much. For the record, it was something like:
"I also suspect Go is related to AGI, so I'm finding the strong advancement a little unnerving (as someone so far skeptical of the likelihood of singularity in our lifetime)"
It's nice that they've improved by nine stones in a year, but what I don't buy is the idea that this means they're going to get up to winning an unhandicapped game against a 9th dan player anytime soon.
As I understand it the game is currently playing like a very good amateur player. If the experience with chess is anything to go by, it took an awful lot of work to get from the point of beating most amateurs to the point of beating Kasparov.
