Letter: After Deep Blue, now Go for it

Sir: The Japanese game of Go will now be seen as the next challenge for machine intelligence after Deep Blue's defeat of Kasparov. However, due to the larger board size the approach of brute force adopted by Deep Blue will not work, even if the computer went 1,000 times faster.

Go forces researchers to attempt to model how people perceive and learn patterns in playing the game, and over the last 10 years substantial progress has been made. It may even be possible in the future to pass a Turing- type Go test whereby it will be impossible to distinguish between a human and machine player of the game.

Turing's test may not be of continuing importance to artificial intelligence, but it is to cognitive science which seeks to build computational models of how people learn, perceive and solve problems.

Dr EDMUND FURSE

Department of Computer Studies

University of Glamorgan

Pontypridd