[computer-go] How did MoGo do it?

[Peter Drake]

Congratulations to MoGo on winning the KGS tournament held earlier  
today:

http://www.gokgs.com/tournEntrants.jsp?sort=s&id=270

Even under borderline "blitz" conditions (18 minutes sudden death for  
19x19), MoGo managed to beat conventional programs like GNU Go.  
(ManyFaces apparently had some connection/restarting glitch, so its  
performance may not be representative.) Of course, MoGo also beat all  
the other MC/UCT programs.

How did MoGo do it? I have three hypotheses:

1) MoGo is completing more runs per second. How many is it doing on  
the machine used in the tournament.
2) MoGo is somehow getting more out of the runs it does, using things  
like the all-as-first heuristic.
3) Each of MoGo's runs is "smarter", through the use of heuristics  
that bias the random games.

My money is on #3. In the limit, of course, a very smart program  
could predict the outcome with one MC run for each move under  
consideration.

Would the MoGo authors (and anyone else) care to weigh in?

Peter Drake
http://www.lclark.edu/~drake/