Michael reiss's basement office in north-west London doesn't look like a launch pad for world-beating technology. To reach it, you negotiate a muddy alley strewn with cardboard boxes and then walk through a carpenter's workshop. Coffins are stacked casually against one wall―the carpenter shares the space with an undertaker. And everything in Reiss's office is covered in a fine layer of sawdust, even his three computers. Yet beneath their dirty cases, these machines are spinning pure gold. Reiss has spent more than a decade developing a computer program that plays the ancient Asian game of Go. His carefully guarded software, called Go4++, is turning out to be a commercial winner in the Far East. It's already a favourite in Japan for example, and millions will soon be able to play it on Sony's PlayStation 2. And now the market in China―potentially more than a billion Go-obsessed people―is also opening up. For Reiss, business is booming. But it's not all fun and games. Go-playing programs may be just what artificial intelligence researchers have been looking for. Teach a computer to play Go well, and you could be on the way to mimicking the workings of the human mind. Computer Go could also lead to serious, everyday applications. Programming techniques originally developed to enhance software that plays games such as chess and draughts are already used in fields such as DNA sequencing, traffic planning, elevator control and task-planning for spacecraft. Who knows what a top-flight Go-playing computer could do for us?
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