European Computer Go Championship Tournament

The 44th European Go championship was held as part of the Hitachi European Go Congress 2000, which ran from July 29th to August 12th in Strausberg, near Berlin.

It included the European Computer Go Championship Tournament, held on August, 9th 2000. The tournament director was Prof. Dr. Ingo Althöfer. There were five participants.

Komi was 5½ points, time limits were 60 minutes.

GoAhead   by Peter Woitke (Berlin, D)     4 wins
TS-Go     by Ivo Tonkes (NL)              3 wins
TurboGo   by Arnoud R. van der Loeff (NL) 2 wins
Gosynier  by Wojciech Wieczorek (PL)      1 win
Augos     by Joachim Pimiskern (D)
So, GoAhead is the new European computer Go champion and successor of TurboGo. TS-Go and Augos both are newcomers. Gosynier had won the second place in the 1999 European competition. The audience was most fascinated by the two games of GoAhead versus TurboGo and TS-Go. Both times the Dutch programs had big moyos, but GoAhead was able to keep the moyos sufficiently small to gain the wins.

Most of the game records are available from this directory.


In the evening of the computer tournament day, there was a fascinating public demonstration of Computer-Go: a "3-hirn" or "3-brain" match between

White: Saijo Masataka (8 pro dan) - Nagoya, Japan (Nihon Kiin)

Black: A "3-hirn" consisting of

  • ManyFacesOfGo 11 beta (D.Fotland), American Computer-Go champion 2000
  • GoAhead (Dr. Peter Woitke), European Computer-Go champion 2000
  • the audience (participants of the EGC 2000)
This game was organized and the idea was developed by Prof. Dr. Ingo Althöfer. The participants of the EGC 2000 had to choose between two candidate moves provided by the computer programs ManyFaces and GoAhead. If both programs agreed on the move to be played, there was no choice.

The game was played with two stones handicap and no komi. After White 31 Black resigned.

A commented record of this 3-hirn game is available in SGF and Ishi format.


The information on this page was provided by Dr. Stefan Mertin and by Prof. Dr.Ingo Althöfer.


Other computer Go Tournament results
computer-go.info