Go Kotlin Go!

In this session, Uberto Barbini shares some experience in writing software to play the game of Go in Kotlin.

The game of Go was born in China more than 2000 years ago and despite its very simple rules is considered more complex than chess and so one of the most interesting from a software developer point of view. Until 2018 when AlphaGo beat the world champion, it was considered humanity’s last stand.

Uberto Barbini presents a didactic Go bot engine he developed in Kotlin. It’s very simple but it is already able to give interesting matches. The session is split into three parts:

An introduction to the game of Go and why is so interesting.
Some game algorithms, side to side with Python equivalents to compare the two styles.
Some considerations on performance, how to identify bottlenecks, and how to improve them, and some counterintuitive facts.

As a final note, Barbini offers some insight on current work on a deep learning engine to bring it to the next level. All the code is available on GitHub.

liuwgq

Uberto Barbini is a polyglot programmer and independent consultant, with more than 20 years of experience designing and building successful software products, and is currently working with financial institutions in London. He is a very passionate and opinionated programmer and enjoys public speaking and blogging. Uberto’s main interests are JVM languages, Functional Programming, and distributed computing. Uberto is currently writing a book about Kotlin. He firmly believes in Agile Manifesto values and principles and he has been practicing TDD since 2000.

ugioh