ERSA’2008
The International Conference on
Engineering of Reconfigurable Systems and Algorithms

The GOmputer Project: Accelerating GO with FPGAs

Prof. Marco Platzner, University of Paderborn, Germany

GO is a very popular board game, especially in the Asian world, with a reported number of more than 50 million players. In contrast to Chess, where programs are able to compete with human top players, GO programs are still rather weak. Game theory classifies GO and Chess as deterministic two-person zero-sum games with complete information, which allows to address them with game tree search techniques such as the alpha/beta algorithm. In principle, these games can be solved exactly. Practically, the high number of possible moves and the depth of the search tree prohibit exact solutions and allow only for a partial analysis of the search tree, requiring runtime consuming heuristic position evaluations.

This talk presents the GOmputer project which aims at accelerating GO through aggressively parallelized game tree search combined with an FPGA-based position evaluation. We briefly discuss the overall project and then focus on FPGA acceleration of several GO position evaluation functions. The central hardware architecture is the game board which is mapped as a cellular automaton directly into hardware. Position evaluation functions are turned into cellular algorithms exploiting the available parallelism at the cell level. We show the hardware implementation of several functions and report on the achieved speedups. Finally, we discuss the current state of the GOmputer project.

Marco Platzner is professor for Computer Engineering at the University of Paderborn, Germany. He received both his PhD and diploma degrees in Telematics from Graz University of Technology, Austria, in 1996 and 1991, respectively. Previously, he held research positions at GMD - Research Center for Information Technology in Sankt Augustin, Germany, at the Computer Systems Lab at Stanford University, Palo Alto, USA, and at the Computer Engineering and Networks Lab of ETH Zurich. His current research interests include reconfigurable computing and hardware-software codesign. Marco Platzner is a member of the IEEE and the ACM, and an associate editor of the International Journal of Reconfigurable Computing and the EURASIP Journal on Embedded Systems. Marco Platzner is also member of the board of the Paderborn Center for Parallel Computing, member of the Advanced System Engineering Center of the University of Paderborn, and member of the faculty at the Advanced Learning and Research Institute (ALaRI) of the University Lugano, Switzerland.