Alejo's Tenuki

A month ago I happened to review most of the free go software available for the android mobile phones. One of the reviewed pieces of software was gobandroid: a simple tool which allowed us to play over a board. During this month there have been some major improvements in this application, which make it feel completely different from the one I reviewed.

The list of improvements starts with the possibility to add skins to the program, with two different skins available in the market. Below these lines there is a comparison so that you can check the difference. As you can see, there are both board and stone textures.

Another major improvement has been imported from Godroid: GnuGo on your mobile phone. As Godroid has been released as GPL, the developer of Gobandroid was able to import the Gnugo function into his software. However, this time gnugo has been implemented as an android service, so it’s running in the background as a standalone service. Fortunately, it’s only called when gobandroid starts and it’s killed when gobandroid is closed (at least theoretically).

Taking into account that gnugo uses around 25-30 Mb of your system’s memory, I’d strongly recommend having any application/task killer so as to stop the process manually when you exit the application. According to gobandroid developer, the addition of gnugo as a service allows for extra additions of other artificial intelligences.

Finally, another recently added feature of gobandroid is the capability to load and save SGF files from your sd card.

A few months ago we already talked about qgo2: a multiserver client for Linux which included IGS, WING, LGS, CyberOro, eWeiQi, Tygem and Tom servers. If you don’t know about this nice piece of software, I’d recommend checking it out. It’s is worth it. In fact, even left as it is, it may still be my main go tool for my Ubuntu. Though there are some bugs, it allows linux users to join the main Asian servers and, if not play in all servers, watch their games.

During these months, Peter -the developer- has been improving qgo2, adding new features and enabling servers. Unfortunately, there seems to be some code issues when it comes to the Qt suite and support isn’t as responsive as expected. Taking into account the amount of free time invested into this project and the results, the developer has finally decided to give up the project.

For further information, I’d recommend checking the qgo-announce2 archives, help about the new Qt 4.6 version and the management of list sorts will be welcomed.

It’s been a couple of years since I first started looking for ways to monetizing this blog. The main ad system on the internet, as you may already have noticed, is Google Adsense. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t realise what this site is about, so you may find strange ads: a post about sacrificing stones happened to bring up ads related with psychology and mental health.

Private banners from Go business either pay too low or just don’t want to be announced around here. In fact, a couple of bloggers have already asked me about this issue, the lack of support from Go business is somewhat surprising compared with other games/sports.

Selling links is somewhat controversial, though the benefits are by far the highest, it is against the Google crawling system, so your site may be punished for doing so. How? The list of results in Google’s search engine is based on the relevance of your site, which they call PageRank. When you sell links by this method, you’re actually selling the influence of your PageRank. If Google finds your selling links, your Pagerank will be decreased and, therefore, the amount of visits from their search engine will decrease.

Recently a new age for blogs has started: social monetizing. Well, there are already a couple of sites running these sort of systems.

This post is based on a real game I was watching on KGS. The game was actually a blitz game, so players didn’t have much time to think about deep strategies, nor did the audience. And that is referring to myself, I wasn’t able to follow some of the moves in real time, I needed some extra time in order to understand some moves, but the one that stroke me the most was played in the next position.

As you can see, black is surrounding the white group around K6, a big dragon indeed, whose death would mean the end of the match.

Market by A,B and C is the sequence I thought of to make the white group live. I couldn’t be more wrong. Ideas and moves like the next one make me realise the huge level difference between myself and a 5 dan player.The sequence I marked, though it grants life, ends up in gote for myself and is just passive defense. On the real game, the movement was exactly the opposite: sente and attack. In an attempt to kill the black group placed around R14, white played T15.

Due to this attack, black was, as well, forced to find a path to life, where was his path? Killing the white group around Q18. This time, I wasn’t even able to think of a passive defense that black had already placed his offensive defense.

I’ll leave you the game below so that you can enjoy it too

This weekend was held the 2010 Barcelona Go Tournament, organised by “La Pedra” club. Finally, a total amount of 146 players showed up for the competition; with over 40 EGF dan players and around 30 double digit kyus, it seems like the tournament level was, on average, quite high.
Taking into account the absence of a few good Spanish players, the amount of local players listed among the top 20 is limited to Oscar Anguila (15th, 3 dan) being Pau Carles the next Spanish player, who appears in the list as 21rst.

Since the amount of players summed up to 146 and it would be a mess to post it here, check the original list for further details HERE.