Alejo's Tenuki

A few days ago we already talked about The Path of Go for the Xbox console, now it’s time to talk about go games for the wii console. For some reason, it seems that previous generations of consoles had a bunch of go games available: from game boy to playstation 2, there are dozens of them, with better or worse graphics and AI strength. But, unfortunately, there aren’t many Go games for the last generation of consoles: wii, xbox 360 and playstation 3.

D3Publisher released a collection of games called “The table game”, as the first volume of the Simple 2000 series. This volume includes 11 games electable from the menu below these lines:

Vertically, from left to right: shogi, go, Othello (aka reversi), gomoku, mahjong, unknown flower-cards game, unknown flower-cards game 2, something similar to bridge, sevens (aka Fan Tan), memory and solitaire – Klondike style. Once you enter the Go section you’re prompted with the next screen where you can choose the board size, handicap, time settings, and a few other fields which I still haven’t managed to decipher. As fas I have explored, I still couldn’t find an online mode or a 2 player mode… but this may require further investigation.

If there is anyone able to read Japanese, please let me know the meaning of the options, specially the ones below, since I suspect they are quite relevant.

When it comes to the AI strenght, I can’t really rate it better than a 10k, I think it falls somewhere between 10k and 15k, but, obvious as it may seem this bot is very  bot-ish: Some important moves which a human would never allow you to do are ignored by this bot, thus losing entire groups or losing the chance to kill groups. Sincerely, the artificial intelligence of this bot is way below what we are used to on computers: Mogobot and Gnugo are much stronger. The life and death status of the groups are very hard to establish for this bot, so he usually tries to survive till you place the final killing stone, waiting for you to make a nonsense move.  On the picture below, you’ll see there are two white groups which weren’t given up till I had placed the final killing stone; in fact, white still tried to make the left group live… which only ended up in giving me some extra points. The bot isn’t actually reading the sequence where it dies. On the other hand, the life and death status of groups in the scoring phase has always been perfect.

The musical section, while being too short, is just adequate and calm enough to allow you to focus on the game while creating some sort of oriental atmosphere. The Wii controller must be held horizontally, placing the stones with button 2 and pressing A for the pause menu. By the way, the first option of the “pause” menu is to “pass”, the second one is “undo last move”, the third is “resign” and the last one is to resume the game. Guess I saved you a bunch of minutes with this.

As for the other games, I can’t really tell you its strength or options, since I lack enough knowledge of them to be trustworthy. I’ve only played a game of shogi against the AI and he defeated me so badly I had to play a few Go games more… guess I’ll have to know more shogi other than just the rules.

Update: this game is available through Amazon.co.jp and through other media, please don’t ask me how to download it, try google.

Last January, during the last Techvista (Microsoft annual research symposium), we could see a preview of the Path of Go. But we had to wait a little bit longer till someone got it hands-on: it was the Joystiq Team that managed to get a premature copy of the game and made a short review.

Though I lack certainty, it seems like the reviewer of the game didn’t knew how to play Go before, since he doesn’t mention something which would be relevant for usual go players: AI strength, rankings and such. When it comes to the game, on-line play is enabled and graphics are quite nice. From my point of view, it may be worth checking the game screen shots as they may look familiar for Second life users: each people has its own avatar, the view can be modified…

Since the original site is copyrighted, I can paste the full content, but the just first sentence of the review makes it worth it to open the link. For further “information”, I’d recommend checking Microsoft’s description on the project: It only takes minutes to learn, but it takes a lifetime to master. (WTF?)

Thanks to uglyboxer from Godiscussions.

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