There's a pretty good article in IEEE Spectrum this month about using FPGA technology to tackle the game of GO
http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5552
Dave turned me on to Go a few years ago. As he explained the principle of the game I remember thinking, "gee, I wonder how feasible it would be to write a computer program to do this...." The article describes some optimizations, but it's still computationally expensive. Very expensive.
