The challenge of Go as a domain for AI research: a comparison between Go and chess

Go provides artificial intelligence (AI) and cognitive science researchers with an easily specified formal domain in which skills of human intelligence cannot be matched by currently known programming techniques. Go is a much more widely played game than chess (principally in Japan, Korea and China), yet it is not well known to AI and cognitive science researchers and our goal in this paper is to introduce some of the challenges of the game to the AI community in the form of a comparison with chess. Go has been called a possible "task par excellence for AI" by Berliner (1978) and we conclude that Go is a domain in which the development of new programming techniques is not only possible but is in fact necessary.