CRUMMY OLD WINE DEPT: Get Rich Quick Scheme No, 1: Write a winning Computer Go program, win U$1,000,000 / from now extinct website "Elmer Elevator's Discount Prep" (via Wayback)

Get-Rich-Quick $cheme$!
         
"So I got this postcard from my friend and
        it said Let's go to Paris and be writers so
        we won't have to work."
                                                      -- William Faulkner
 
What does a fellow or girl do who's lazy and self-indulgent and doesn't like to work for a living? The chief trouble with working is Bosses and Alarm Clocks. I don't like getting up early and suddenly in the morning, and I really dislike Bosses.
 
By the way, did you know that the moment of the week when people have the most heart attacks is Monday morning? My medical advice to everyone is:  Stop Working for Bosses Immediately.
 
            "Jack's always talkin' about the Workin' Man. The Workin' Man
            wants this. The Workin' Man wants that. You wanna know what
            the Workin' Man wants?  I'll tell ya what the Workin' Man wants.
            He wants to stop workin'."
                                                                -- Eugene O'Neill (Jack Nicholson), "Reds"
Get-Rich-Quick Schemes are extremely important long before they ever make you rich. Daydreaming about the moment you dig up a buried pirate treasure and what you'll do with all the Loot is certainly one of life's great pleasures.
 
Of course you can't be silly or irresponsible about your get-rich-quick fantasy. It has to be a realistic fantasy; you can't just generically slobber and drool and mutter "Pieces of eight, pieces of eight" all day for years on end. You'll never get anywhere that way.
 
Here are two realistic get-rich-quick schemes, most of which you can pursue in the privacy of your home computer.
 
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Get-Rich-Quick $cheme No. 1
The Ing Prize
 
The ancient game Go comes from China and Japan. The rules are very simple, but playing well requires decades of fierce competitive play and intensive study. Most Westerners who play Go are chessplayers who were looking for a new challenge; most players familiar with both games believe Go is more difficult than chess.
 

Go game in progress. Black made the first move; thereafter Black and White alternately place a stone on one of the 19 x 19 intersections (or a player may pass). Go games typically generate aesthetically beautiful patterns of stones; some players say the beauty of the pattern is more important than winning. Players also take pleasure in the click sound a stone makes when it's placed on the board. 
 
In the past twenty years, computers have become superb chessplayers; many $100 boxes play at the Master level and beyond. The special-purpose chess machine Deep Blue, the souped-up child of a grad-school project, Deep Thought, recently defeated the world's best human player, Gary Kasparov. (He was a sore loser, but Deep Blue was a very gracious and sportsthinglike winner.)
 
During that same period, an enormous amount of work by a lot of very smart people has gone into trying to make computers play Go well.

The latest news -- see the results of the latest Fost Cup tournament below -- is that they're making progress, but still way behind the strength of human Go masters. (Currently there's a big debate on the Newsgroup between "Go programs are making great progress! Victory's just around the corner!" vs. "Hogwash. Go programs are still dopes compared to humans.")
 
Why this is nobody is quite sure. A lot of the lessons chess programmers learned ought to be applicable to computer Go -- but obviously they aren't.
 
And Go seems like such a simple game, much simpler than chess. There's only one kind of piece, the stone; and given any intersection (x,y), either there's a black stone there, or a white stone, or nothing at all. There are no dice or elements of chance. There are no hidden things; you always see exactly what your opponent sees, which is all there is to see. A computer ought to eat this kind of situation up with a spoon.
 
One constraint on your brilliant computer-Go program is Time ... your box not only has to figure out The Right Move, but has to do it within time limits that also apply to its human foe. As it is, one nickname for Go is rotten axe handle, from a legend about a woodsman who paused to watch a fascinating Go game, and when it was over, his brand new axe handle had rotted away. As a spectator sport, we are talking Paint Drying here.
 
   –—˜™š›œ�™˜—–

For many years now, a Taiwanese businessman named Mr. Ing Chang-Ki  has offered
  ONE MILLION DOLLAR$
to the computer Go program which can defeat his designated Human Go Master.


BULLETIN:

 Mr. Ing Chang-Ki
died 27 August 1997
    at age 84.
But his Prize is still waiting to be won!
 
Danny Swarzman, of the San Francisco Goe Club (he keeps spelling it that way, which is fine) reports that the
 
97 World 
Computer Go Congress

was held in San Francisco on 21-23 November, and here's what happened after the programs had competed:
 
Rank  Program           Programmer                Nation
   1  Handtalk          Chen Zhixing              China
   2  Go4++             Michael Reiss             UK
   3  Go Intellect      Ken Chen                  USA
   4  Silver Igo        Naritatsu Yamamoto        Japan
                        (Silver Star Japan)
   5  Many Faces of Go  David Fotland             USA
   6  MODGO             Alfred & Walter Knoephle  Germany
   7  FunGo             Park Yong Goo             Korea
   8  Star of Poland    Janusz Kraszek            Poland
   9  Explorer          Martin Mueller            Austria
. 10  Super Ego         Bruce Wilcox              USA   .

Then "... Handtalk was matched against three human players. Handtalk was allowed to place 11 stones as a handicap. [A huge handicap! Nine stones is the most you get in a human-human game.] Handtalk defeated Lin Ting-Chao, a 13-year-old Taiwanese 2 Dan by three points and Jonathan Wang, an American 6 Dan by 21 points. Hwang Yi-Tsuu, an 11-year-old Taiwanese 4 Dan soundly defeated Handtalk."
 
Notice that Handtalk was also the winner of the Fost Cup competition in August!
 
Summing up: An 11-year-old boy prevented the smartest Go program in the world from winning a million bucks. Apparently your Go Monster Revenge Robot has to trash THREE human opponents in a row to establish that victory isn't a fluke.
 
So. There you are. Simple as that.

If you don't know how to program a computer ...

Well. I really don't know what to say. You have my sympathies.

Imagine spending $1000 or $2000 on a box and only being able to use one percent of its power and potential! Hahahahaha! You ought to be ashamed of yourself ... especially since you can learn to program in QBasic (which they threw in with your DOS/Windows machine for FREE!) with just one night's study!
 
But if you do know how to program, Get to Work on a Go Program Now!!!
 
   –—˜™š›œ�™˜—–

To sample the flavor of the Web community that's trying to write stronger, faster, smarter Go programs and win the million bucks, you might want to subscribe to
the Computer Go Newsgroup
(and I guess type SUBSCRIBE in the subject and body; that ought to do it. They've recently moved from Australia to France.) If you expect to find a lot of people perpetually drooling over what they plan to do with Mr. Ing's Million Bucks, you'll be disappointed; these people are focused big-time! Most of the time I haven't the foggiest notion what they're talking about. (The Greeks, who naturally don't say "It's all Greek to me!" say instead: "It's all Chinese to me!")
 
But you can sort of intuit through the GeekSpeak that a frighteningly high percentage of these Computer Go correspondents are real smart! Reading their correspondence as they toss ethereal ideas back and forth just sorta makes a feller proud to belong to the same species. (At least I think I belong to the same species.)
 
Now you're going to need a Go board and a set of stones. You can get 'em cheap. Or expensive. Top-of-the-line Go boards are carved from a single tree grown specially for the purpose, and can cost $50,000. But you can get a more modest board and stones for about $65.

 As for books, if you start getting good at Go, eventually there's a problem for English-speakers: About 95 percent of Go literature is written in Asian languages. A math professor friend of mine solved this by living with a Japanese Go master for a year; he now also teaches Japanese. But there are plenty of English Go books to get you beyond beginner.
  The Japanese Go Master's Tale
The Japanese Go Master lived with his wife and maybe a kid or two in your basic Japanese apartment/flat, which is like your basic USA linen closet -- essentially one room for eating, sleeping, dancing, playing Go, etc. (Married Japanese men are strongly encouraged to leave home after dinner so they won't be underfoot during the dining-dormitory transition, so the entire husband population goes to Pachinko pinball parlors for two or three evening hours.)
 
One evening my pal and the Master are chatting, and the Master says, "My wife would really love a small house in the suburbs. But they are so expensive, I cannot afford it." Then he looks at his Go board, which is worth about $50,000. "Now and then I think about maybe selling this board ... naaaaah!"
 
"Well," my pal explained to me, "marriage is a little different in Japan." 

Here are some Computer Go buzzwords you should become familiar with:
  ¡   trees (not the wooden ones, the Platonic Objects)
       ®   alpha-beta
       ®   life and death, joseki
       ¡   minimax
       ®  hashing codes
       ¡   the Game of Life

Incidentally, there's a theory about computer chess that the best programmers tend to be fairly lousy players -- the idea being that after years of humiliating evidence (often provided by 13-year-old boys with thick glasses and pimples) that you're always going to be a hopeless potzer, something snaps, and you seek Revenge by constructing a Frankenstein Monster Chess Robot that will crush and annihilate all those who made you feel like such a schmuck all those years. I suspect the same is true for computer Go.

I also suspect spending years to become a very fine Go player might even be counterproductive to try for the Ing Prize. Becoming a human Go master is an intellectual task that requires no knowledge of computers. Writing an ass-kicking computer Go program is an entirely different task, and it's quite possible the less you know about the advanced strategic aspects of Go, the better, because the idea is to make the computer do all the fancy thinking.
 
The 3rd International
  Fost Cup
 
... the annual slugfest between the world's best computer Go programs, was held in Nagoya Japan on 27-28 August 1997. (Computer Go isn't an isolated phenomenon; the tournament was part of an important world conference on artificial intelligence.)
Many of the top programs and their creators are old friends to Computer Go Newsgroup subscribers. They may not be posting every one of their trade secrets and magic tricks, but many of them are very generous with their highly interesting and obviously successful ideas.

Besides the Ing Prize, there's a Great Deal of Money to be made (mostly in Asia) by writing a strong Go program that can be sold in a handheld machine or as a home computer program -- just like home chess programs and machines.

DID I SAY THERE'S MONEY TO BE MADE SELLING YOUR GO PROGRAM? CHECK OUT THIS E-MAIL:
 
    So far income from sales in Japan has been much higher
    than the [tournament] prizes. I have one 2nd, and a    couple of 3rd's in the world.
 
    But software is a great get-rich scheme. I sent a
    Japanese company my source code on a floppy, they did
    all the work of making a Japanese version and selling
    it, and they send me royalty checks.
    It's like money for nothing.
 
right right, money for nothing, this is a real underachiever talking, a real hammock & Budweiser sorta guy

    I use the money to buy bigger, faster, computers
    (I have 5 now), and to pay for travel, but not to
    anyplace very interesting yet.

                     -- David Fotland
                        author of "Many Faces of Go"

The new world champ, Chen ZhiXing's Handtalk, walked away from Nagoya with about U$16,500, which is not chopped liver. After beating all its international silicon foes, Handtalk then played an exhibition game against a Human Girl with a 2-kyu (very strong handicap -- lower the number, stronger the player), and squeaked out a one-point win. (The girl had little or no experience playing Go via keyboard, mouse and screen; but then the computer had little or no experience playing little girls.)

The judges were impressed with the strength of Handtalk's game and certified Handtalk as 3-kyu -- also not chopped liver, and money in the bank for Handtalk's commercial future. Next year's Fost Cup will be held in Tokyo at the end of August.

 rank  program          programmer          nation
    1  Handtalk         Chen ZhiXing        China
    2  Go Intellect     Ken Chen            USA
    3  Go 4++           Michael Reiss       England
    4  Star of Poland   Janusz Kraszek      Poland
    5  Silver Igo       Naritatsu Yamamoto  Japan
    6  Gogol            Tristan Cazenave    France
    7  Biwako           Masahiro Tanaka     Japan
    8  Aya              Hiroshi Yamashita   Japan
    9  Jimmy            Shi-Jim Yan         Taiwan
   10  Fun Go           Park Yong-Goo       Korea
   11  Stone            Kuo-Yuan Kao        USA

CORRECTION! Fotland's Many Faces finished 11th!
(I just don't know how that changes the other standings.)

.  12  Many Faces of Go    David Fotland     USA   .

Well? What are you waiting for? Start Programming!

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    As I walk along the Bois de Boulogne
    With an independent air
    You can see the ladies stare --
    "He must be a millionaire!"
    You can see them sigh and wink an eye
    And to wish that they could die
    For The Man Who Broke the Bank at Monte Carrrrrrrlo!
 
Merci to Didier K., an actual French guy, for correcting my spelling of Bois de Boulogne.

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