Reflections on building two Go programs
Bruce A. Wilcox · ACM SIGART Bulletin · 1985
From 1972 to 1979 I co-designed and built what became the world's strongest computer Go program, the Reitman-Wilcox Go Program [1]. It took 7 person-years, 8K lines of LISP, 3 megabytes of memory, and an IBM mainframe. Recently I constructed a similar program, called NEMESIS...the Go Master (tm). It has taken 1 person-year, 13.5K lines of C, 146 kilobytes of memory, and an IBM-PC. They play at a similar strength and by similar means. This article discusses both how I went about reengineering the old program and what I learned during this process.