About Steenvreter
Steenvreter is a strong Go program written by Erik van der Werf.
At the core of Steenvreter is a state-of-the-art MCTS engine with various Go-specific enhancements. Steenvreter can recognise life and death, generally does not have difficulties with seki, supports both Chinese and Japanese rules, has some understanding of semeais, and in special cases it even solves the position.
Results
- 2011:
- 2010:
- 2009:
- 2008:
- 2007:
*1) Hardware is an important factor in the strength of modern Go programs. From its first appearance in 2007 to September 2011 Steenvreter ran all listed tournaments on a quad-core machine (Intel Q6600). As can be seen from the results it became increasingly difficult to keep up with the top using this old machine (some opponents use large clusters with in some cases even more than a thousand processors). The November 2011 KGS tournament was a first experiment using something slightly stronger (12 threads @ 2.2 GHz). The 2011 Olympiad games were played using 46 threads running at 2.2 GHz on a machine generously provided by the Maastricht Games and AI Group.
*2) Steenvreter also participated in the 2008 Computer Olympiad in Beijing. However the results were disappointing at least in part due to severe network connection problems. Further, some bugs in the program may also have played a role...
Publications
There is not a lot published on Steenvreter. I could probably write several papers and PhD theses on it, but generally I'm too busy with other 'more interesting' things. However, if for some reason you want to refer to Steenvreter then maybe the following publications are useful:
- Steenvreter wins 9x9 Go Tournament.
E.C.D. van der Werf (2007).
ICGA Journal Vol.30, No. 2, pp. 109-110.
[unedited version]
Contact information
To contact the author of Steenvreter send an email to:
