Alejo's Tenuki

Talking about the professional Go world, we have a new incorporation to the Go Blogsphere: Cho Hye-yeon (Korean 7p) writes her own blog at Full of surprises, where she talks about her last games, how she faced 132 mirrored moves (except for a move) during a pro game and other experiences related with Go.

If we refer to computer go, we have a couple of good posts made lately. The first one of them, made by the creator of Deep Blue, Feng - Hsiung Hsu: Craking Go at IEEE spectrum, where he talks about the future of computer go while making a correlation with the development of chess software. As resources should always be mentioned, this was refered to by through computer-go mailing system.

The second one involving computers can be useful for most of us. Xed-over, at GoDiscussions.com, mentions a command-line based way to use Gnugo in debug mode... Personally, I think the best thing you can do is to try it and you'll have a nice surprise, it is very easy to use and the weaker you are, the more it'll help you. There has been a lot of computer activity at GoDiscussions since there are even two posts going on at the same time talking about ranking and club managements softwares: 1 & 2.

Another interesting post at GoDiscussions.com, not focused in Go but in intelligence, there is "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". It's a scientific research on this field which awesome results.

On more Go related, we have the The Gokyo Shumyo a day Calendar: "The Gokyo Shumyo is a classic tsumego text considered "required learning." The tsumego range from very easy to very hard."

(this post tries to be as objective as possible)

One of the first post I wrote on this blog was about Moyo Go Studio being released freely on the internet by its author, Frank de Groot.

This last week the Go community (the whole Go community) received very bad news:

Moyo Go Studio is not being maintained any more and the company that sold it is out of business.

For quite a few years, I fought an uneven battle against the "Go Software Millionaires" (John Fairbairn, Anders Kierulf) and other "Powers That Be" (Jan van der Steen, Arno Hollosi, AGA's leadership's intermediate Philip Waldron).
These people, for financial, ideological or ego- reasons, did not want the product to succeed, and used their clout to initiate a comprehensive boycot of Moyo Go Studio.

Recently, after having perused the website that used to be here, oogle Inc. offered me a job.
This event helped me to see things in their proper perspective, to call it quits on Moyo Go and move on.
Not to Google, but to working on a new software project.

To those customers that protested against the censorship I say thank you and sorry it had to end this way! To those customers who did not: Please don't email me - it's too late to change anything.
There will be no more weekly pro games, and due to lack of public interest, I have deleted the sourcecode - making room for my next project.

Frank

This text is extracted from the original MGS site. As you can see, Frank has stopped the development of Moyo Go Studio. And yes, bad news for everyone.

During the last year, there has been a lot of controversy around MGS. You could like Frank, you could dislike him, you could be against his methods, you could just enjoy the result... these are all subjective points of views, but the point, the real fact, is that he was a big Go programmer.

Beyond doubt, Moyo Go Studio is a big program, so full of features you could be exploring them till the extenuation and a reasonable amount of them were exclusive of this software. The computer-side requirements were quite high, but as a reward you had real-time pattern matching which can't be found on other programs.

The beginning of MGS controversy started with the games collection... and moved on to the forums due to the lack of Frank's lack of self-control on the internet. And, though it is not possible to settle who shooted, a war started at one of the most important Go communities on the internet: Rec.Games.Go. There you can find most information on the topic.

His program was censored from Sensei's Library. Uncommon decision by its owners, as it contradicts the fundamentals of the library: "Sensei's Library is meant to be a place where Go players can meet to find information, contribute information and discuss any items related to Go. (...) You are encouraged to contribute to existing articles and add new ones. Your wisdom will then be available to all subsequent users. You can expand entries and correct mistakes if you see them, or add comments, etc."
Consequently, if a program is banned from that library, then knowledge is being "deleted" or, at least, it makes much more difficult for common users to reach information.

The American Go Association published a review about Moyo Go Studio which I can't reproduce here for copyright reasons. Try to get a copy by yourself, compare it with reality and get your own conclusions.

Personally, I don't know who or what was behind that review, nor do I want to know it. I'll keep on playing Go, but I think this terrible lost should warn us about the internet Go world. Not everything is as nice as it seems and, currently, there is only one online resource of Go knowledge (with all it carries).