Alejo's Tenuki

The “IT Crowd” plays boardgames

alejo — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 15:56:25 +0000

A few weeks ago a friend of mine sent me a 360º panorama from the IT Crowd basement as he was aware of my enthusiasm towards this sitcom. I spent a few minutes trying to figure out images and objects… till I focused my eyes on the upper shelf behind Moss.

As you can see from the image above, they’ve placed 5 boardgames, in the following order: Memoir ’44 (is it the main game or an add-on?), Shadows over camelot, Mystery of the Abbey, Ticket to Ride and War onTerror. After checking the characteristics of every game I didn’t know, actually just 2 of them, it seems like the games were randomly bought and placed there. Obviously, these games would fit in a single collection but, taking into account the huge differences between them, it should be quite big. Mystery of the Abbey and Ticket to ride made me suspect about games driven by Hand Management but my theory failed against War on Terror, so that’s where I got my conclusion from.

I’m quite certain some of you wonder about the reason for posting. Easy: most Go players are somewhat nerds, who may enjoy watching this comedy and playing the same games I do. For the ones who didn’t know these games, I would recommend starting with Ticket to Ride, an easy family game with certain luck factor and lots of fun if played with 4-5 players.

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Alejo returns to KGS

alejo — Thu, 08 Jul 2010 08:26:05 +0000

Since I moved from home, changed job and modified my lifestyle, I’ve started playing go more often. In fact, I’ve been checking my stats on KGS and needed to fall back to the first half of 2008 to find a month with this playing rate.

Actually, it’s only been 12 games on KGS plus a few more on real life with my flat-mate, which places me around the 20 games per month. You may say:”that’s not too much, in fact, it’s too few”… but you’d do better to remember that I haven’t played a single game on KGS for the last 15 months and that 2007 wasn’t a very productive year either.

Well, let’s see if I can surpass the 6k barrier where I’m stuck at…

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See what you want to see

alejo — Tue, 22 Jun 2010 19:05:59 +0000

For some reason I’m missing, I only happen to see what I want to see or, more specifically, what I think I should see. During a game, if I think I don’t have any possible escape or way to survive, I’ll miss it and give up reading. And viceversa, were I to think there is a solution, I’d read till I find it.

As you may have already guessed, this brings me some hard times while playing go. It feels like if I had a reading-switcher in my mind, which would unconsciously block me from reading certain sequences, thus leading me to unexpected fights or, in this case, death and defeat.

The situation above is extracted from a game I played this week… and I’m black. Though I could have resigned by now, I still thought I had a remote chance of winning thanks to killing the C15 stones and the survival of the E6 group. However, during the middle game, I didn’t expect the huge dragon on the bottom right to be severely threatened and, therefore, I didn’t bother about its future till it was did bad. As you can see above, black is about to be cut and die.

No. Wait a second, this is a 20-25 kyu tsumego. Black lives. It took 10 seconds on my post-game review, I’m quite certain you can find it too, don’t you?

Unfortunately, I missed the right sequence during the game. All my reading was focused on sacrificing the L13 stones and connecting. In the end, I managed to kill my L13 stones and the huge dragon on the bottom right (I’m not uploading the sequence… or I’ll have nightmares for an entire month). The only excuse for this error is the first sentence of this post: I only happen to see what I want to see or, more specifically, what I think I should see. I remember being convinced that white would get what he wanted and I would lose the game. Though my mood constantly modifies my style from an all-offensive game to a big moyo strategy, it’s the first time I realise how much my game is influenced by the positivity (or lack) embedded in my thoughts.

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Tsumegos and my reading (in)ability

alejo — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 18:04:44 +0000

This week I’ve decided to start playing go, again. After some teaching during the weekend, I needed to play some serious games over the net. As a result I ended up badly beaten by a 11k in KGS, due to some huge careless reading – assuming that not reading at all could be considered careless reading.

Playing another game with a friend on a real board forced me to improve my reading if I wanted to win after another awful fuseki. After some pincering and counter-pincering we were both engaged on a huge fight for a side of the board. And there was another fight on the opposite corner. These two situations made me wonder about the power of a good reading ability.

In order to fix this weakness of mine, I’ve been trying to solve some problems on SmartGo. And there it was, this unexpectedly cool tsumego with black trying to live on the corner or connecting through D1. If I was confronted this situation during a real game as white, my first move would have been to play D1, just to tear black appart, but it would have allowed him to live on the corner withougt any benefit on my side. So my thoughts would have led me to play B4 and assume there was nothing to do about it.

First glance conclusion at this tsumego was nothing but a huge surprise: Black can be killed!! This could be incredibly useful for my games! After having spent a few minutes on this tsumego, I gave up. A2, B1, C1, D1 and E1 were the first moves from my unsucessful attempts. And there it was, the solution. Painfully simple and effective.

Since there are lots of branches in the sgf, I’ll upload a limited version on the image by the end of the post, as well as the sgf files loaded in Eidogo.

It all started with the position above: white failed to kill black during the real game. In fact, after having spent some long minutes thinking of it and trying to read sequences, I gave up and replayed the situation at the PC. Unfortunately, I couldn’t manage to get a successful result for white but I still wonder about the real chances I had of killing black. Can you kill black?

Well, here I leave the sequence to the first tsumego, as you can see it’s so painfully obvious and simple, it hurts.

And the full sgf loaded on Eidogo, so that you can explore as much branches as you wish:

[Embedded SGF File]

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Free Moyo Go Studio, once again

alejo — Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:38:17 +0000

Three years ago Frank de Groot decided to release Moyo Go Studio for free during a brief period of time. That unexpected decision, altogether with Frank announcing its retirement from the Go scene, was already commented on this blog back then, closely followed by the opposite post. As years passed by, we could see Frank working on its piece of software, with improvements going slightly unnoticed due to censorship in certain sites.

So, going back to the purpose of this post, it seems like Frank has decided to release Moyo Go Studio for free, once again. You can download this powerful tool from his site though it would be better to have other download sources, since the server is somewhat busy right now and speeds aren’t that high. The whole program itself weights about 300 MB and it includes an initial database of 57086 professional games but other downloads are available summing up hundreds of thousands of new games from amateur games extracted from KGS, CyberKiwon, IGS, NNGS and Tygem.

The more the download percentage increases, the more I wonder about the real purpose behind releasing Moyo Go Studio for free. Did Frank actually have a selling spree back in 2007? Releasing this software for free would certainly allow him to get into the news, which would make MGS more popular. However, a current free release of a program may not be the best way to fulfil his hopes, since it would be a whole lot more difficult to erase the free version of MGS from the net than it was last time.

In the end, Frank may just be tired of selling his product and just wishes everyone could use his program.

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Teaching Go in Pamplona

alejo — Sun, 06 Jun 2010 17:03:52 +0000

Three weeks ago I moved to Pamplona (Navarra), worldwide famous for its bull races in San Fermin, and it seems that the city remains unaware of the existence of Go. Till this weekend.

Due to some unexpected facts, I was asked to teach Go during Saturday. So, with just around 10 days, a friend of mine (who was asked in first place to teach go) and I happened to get a few boards and some hundreds of stones for each colour.

Expected amount of visitors? Unknown. Expected duration of the session? Unknown. Expected media available (computer…)? Unknown. Expected number of tables and chairs available? Unknown. F**k…

Now I think you’ll already start figuring out my feelings as the day approached. Finally we were given over 25 small boards printed out on paper, so that we could teach the basics on 9×9 and 7×7 boards, though the smallest board were only used to teach atari-go. Stones, borrowed from a club in Barcelona, were placed on plastic glasses.

Saturday, 5:00 pm, the show gets started. Luckily, we’ve managed to arrange several tables on a row, placed the boards and chairs before anyone happens to ask us for a game. Actually, they were waiting for us to finish the preparation since I could only take a single deep breath before someone came to take a peek.
This man, in his middle 30s, with a nicely-shaved beard, a polite shirt and a -unnoticed by me- huge camera by his feet. Ten minutes later, we’re playing a normal game on a 9×9 board and, from my point of view, it seems like he’s enjoying the game, but he refuses to play more since there are other people waiting. A few seconds later his camera depicts the whole situation: most chairs are occupied with people ready to attend to the explanation.

Players range from 6 years to slightly over 50, but there is a pack of 3 guys who happen to be board game players or good strategists, they pick the game within a few minutes and spend 3 hours playing. Yes, they learnt to play Go somewhere close to 5:30 pm and left after 8 pm. Since they’ve already made a few matches on a 9×9 board, I lend them the 13×13 board. As I wasn’t able to check their game, the consequences were predictable: it’s a chaotically-offensive game. But since they are 3 of them, I’m left with one of them and start a 9×9 game with 5 handicap stones.
To sum it up: he’s able to count up to 5 moves and manages to create a seki situation without being aware of its existence. Scary.

So, after three hours of intensive teaching, over 25 people have learnt to play go in Pamplona. They’ve asked for shops, history, taken photos and everyone has been given a board. I’ll be looking forward to hearing from some of these.

Edit: As far as today, 27th July, I haven’t heard from anyone playing go in Pamplona. They are either too scared or I was too optimistic.

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Flattr invitations available

alejo — Thu, 27 May 2010 21:38:24 +0000

We already talked about Flattr a couple of weeks ago and I finally got some invitations. So if anyone wants to join, just drop me a line on the comments.
As you’ll realise, this is mainly focused on bloggers and website owners, but also for visitor who would like to show some appreciation for good content.

By the way, there is no way I’m getting any percentage or tax by inviting people.

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From webcam to sgf file

alejo — Sat, 22 May 2010 11:37:19 +0000

There was a long topic recurrently appearing in Godiscussions: it would be great to save sgf files directly to the hard disk. Some users had tried it combining several tools, which made it a quite complex procedure for anyone but tech-savvy players.

Unless you’ve been living in another world, you’ll already have noticed the users migration from Godiscussions to Lifein19x19 with both administrators agreement. So the original GD discussion moved on to the new forum. By the way, I just happened to register in Lifein19x19 with the same nick: Alejo. The structure of the forum is very similar and the registration process is totally painless and just takes a minute.

On the Computer Go section, we can see this software announced:

From the video above, the result looks quite promising. Stone detection is very good and the program detects in-game board rotations. Though the video is quite limited and we can’t see all its features, adding a territory counter, while not very difficult, would be quite useful. On the other hand, the developer still hasn’t decided whether to release it freely or not, so we’ll have to wait for the final decision.

While writing the previous lines I’ve started wondering about possible software combinations for these tool. How would this affect the Go software market if this application was embedded in SmartGo or Moyo Go Studio?

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Re-defining the classics

alejo — Tue, 18 May 2010 10:29:07 +0000

When a player, currently enjoying their third or forth decade, is asked about a classic game from his childhood, there are high numbers that Monopoly, Risk or Clue come out among the first places. The time when these games were considered with high standards has long passed away. Today, I can’t imagine a gamer (i.e. a person who often plays games) trying to teach Risk or Monopoly to his son. It would be unbearable, it’s not just the amount of time it would require for both to be able to enjoy a game or the effort input to move a 8-years-old boy’s eyes from the videoconsole the slightly boring and dull board of Monopoly.

Being close to my thirties, I’m starting to see some couples around myself with newborn. Obviously, I’m not going to try teaching Go to someone younger than 3, he would certainly eat the stones!! But the minimum recommended age for “The Kids of Catan” are 4 years; and I can tell you I’ve seen one enjoying it with just a hand. Hey, wait a second, Blokus can also be played with 5 years!! Though I lack experience on this game, I’m quite convinced both parents are children are equally matched on the board.

With 6 years, you can already make videoreviews on boardgames. If you don’t trust me, just check Games with Hayden. In fact, there is another family where both children, not aged the same, make videoreviews and comment on them, so you can understand their thoughts on the game.

Shortly afterwards, we find ourselves with the 8-10 frontier with great games which both adults and kids can enjoy at the same level… or not, I’m certain I would have been better at Ubongo than I’m right now. But here we have some educational gems and, in order to avoid making this post too long, I’ll comment on just a game.
“The Settlers of Catan”, hands-down one of the best gateway games: resource management, a bit of strategy, commerce and negotiation, with some randomness played in just 60-90 minutes. Unless you haven’t been in Earth during the last 15 years, you’ll know what I talking about, if you don’t… then watch this reviews and buy it, the other option would be to buy it straight away, without watching the reviews. A complete must-have.
So current kids will find themselves playing The settlers of Catan, Carcassone, Ticket to Ride, Dominion or Bohnanza, when we used to play Monopoly (endless 4 hours games), and Risk (did I already say endless long hours?). Videogames can be left aside by the eye-catching Galaxy Trucker, Through the Desert, The Pillars of the Earth…

When this children become grown-ups, what do you think they will consider classic family board games?
My vote goes for The Settles of Catan as the first option…

Some of you may think of other games such as chess, checkers, pachisi… though this would need a whole new post to talk about them, I’ll try to sum it up into a couple of sentences. The first two – chess and checkers – require the kid to endure intensive training if they want to play on the same level as their parents and this is usually reached within the arrival of mature thinking during the second decade. Pachisi and domino are clearly beaten by other modern games when it comes to enjoyability and interaction for children below 10 years.

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Flattr activated

alejo — Fri, 14 May 2010 13:08:18 +0000

As you can see by the bottom of this post, a new button has been inserted. It’s the flattr button, and you’re going to start finding it all over the internet within the next few weeks/months… Flattr was already mentioned on my post about monetizing blog sites, as well as Scratchback – another irritatingly unsuccessful system on my blog which consisted on giving tips in exchange for links.

What is Flattr all about? You’d better watch this video.

Unfortunately, it’s still a closed beta, so you’ll have to apply for an invitation and it’ll be granted when the your time has arrived. It’s been a few weeks since I signed up, but I’ve heard they’ve sending lots of invitations lately, so it may not take that long for you.

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Considerations on blogging

alejo — Mon, 10 May 2010 12:20:56 +0000

This blog is already a few years old, it all started 3 years ago, January from 2007. Back then I was around 11k in KGS and, currently being 7k, I can’t say I’ve improved much during these years. This blog was started due to a Go hype I endured for the first couple of years, when I used to play at least once a week. Lately this tendency has been modified to somewhere like one game each… three months.

A side effect of this playing pace is the lack of games to review and the lack of interest in improving (reading, learning, watching pros…). So I focused my attention into Go software, which seemed to be quite an unknown field, since there weren’t reviews or comparisons available on the internet. For some reason, I considered it useful to have software reviewed and commented, users have shown me the opposite. There has been, if any, very little feedback, comments, suggestions or collaborations. Till recently, the reason for posting was the joy I obtained with doing so, added to the increase of visitors; it doesn’t appeal me any more.

Though the site will remain open to suggestions and collaborators, from now and on, I’ll post about whatever I enjoy, which will be mostly but not only: boardgames. Ultimately, the purpose of posting should be to enjoy doing so. And I’ve started by adding a “Recently played games” column on the right sidebar.

Enjoy

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Monetizing go sites

2nd TransAtlantic Youth Go Match

alejo — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 14:29:15 +0000

Day: April 18, 2010.
Hour: 15:00 GMT, 11 AM Eastern, 8 AM Pacific
Place: KGS server

What happens?? North America versus Europe.
Rules: ING rules, with time controls of 30 minutes main time + 10 moves/5 minutes Canadian-style overtime.

By now you should have already filled that day on your calendar with a “do not disturb, I’m at KGS” note. Or, at least, this is what the poll at Godiscussions points out, since a third of the participants haven’t voted for North America nor Europe, but for a KGS collapse.

Just in case you want to know the players for each team, check the American Go Association announcement.

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Ipad go news

alejo — Sun, 04 Apr 2010 09:30:43 +0000

Apple’s new device, Ipad, has already started to generate news involved with the go world. There are several users interested in buying this tablet, so I guess it would be interesting to do reviews of these pieces of software. Unfortunately, I’m not going to buy one, so guess we’ll have to get information from other sources.

Smartgo has already announced a version for the Ipad, available in the appstore for $19.99. According to Anders’ blog: “the two apps are still pretty close, but over time I expect them to diverge:

The screen size of the iPad allows whole new features that will either be missing or limited on the iPhone.
Even for shared functions, the UI will over time change away from the iPhone version and become optimized for the iPad.
The extra power will allow more game records. Initially, SmartGo Kifu includes 20,000 pro games, but I hope to increase that significantly as soon as I know how the iPad performs.”

Unfortunately, having a different version for the iPad means that iPhone users will have to pay an extra license if they want to enjoy this version of Smartgo in their new tablet.
This is one screenshot from the emulator screenshots, where we can already see there are a few new options available:

As for server clients, Yetle at godiscussions.com has already taken a picture of the KGS client working through VNC in his iPad. William M. Shubert (KGS’ developer) has already stated that there will be a special edition available for Android tablets, avoiding to specify if there’s going to be an iPad version for this server. If we take into account the lack of a KGS client for iPhone, we can already assume iPad users won’t have a specific version on a short term.

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Life and death KGS tsumegos

alejo — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 15:55:13 +0000

Sometimes, while watching a game on KGS, you find a game filled with the traditional tsumegos you’ve repeated once and again in Goproblems.com. Here is one of these samples, where you’ll find some problems for double-digit kyus, some that I didn’t manage to solve in real time and some I wouldn’t have solved with a decent amount of time. This game was played on KGS, between Naomichan and Howzulee, white and black respectively, being both 6 dans according to the KGS rating system. You’ll have the whole game loaded in Eidogo by the end of the post, but I’d like to put some pictures of the game.

As you can see from the image below, right at the beginning of the middle game, they both had a floating group, marked with triangle for black and circle for white; moreover, the latter has two unconnected cutting stones. From this image you can already theorise the nature of this game will be involved with fighting, right?

A few moves later, the next situation showed up:

As a you can see, white is trying to close black and kill him, and thus, the played this hane in J14. Unfortunately for white, he has many weaknesses and cutting points around so this wasn’t the best option. On the other hand, if white hadn’t played this capping move and he had played J13, for example, black would still have tried to struggle for life escaping through the J14 gap. If you already imagine what happened, you may want to skip these lines, but once you’ve reached this point and realised white has to sacrifice one side, which one would you retain? You can choose between the upper one, which gives you quite a a moyo on the upper side of the board since we are talking about pressing on the fifth line. But then black would have a strong group on the centre of the board from K7 to K 14 and would have certain advantage in future fights. If you decide to sacrifice the upper side, you are giving out a lot of points by saving the K13 stones, but you may be able to keep some pressure on the K7 group.

A few moves later, the next situation showed up:

On this image you’ll see what a 6 dan player thinks of this situation: give up the upper side and gain strength to attack the central black group, the shape of white around the J13 stone is quite strong but could be improved using some sort of net-like move, H12 or H11 for a lighter connection. But I can’t say I would taken the same path. You can zoom in the image to take a deeper look.

So now black floating group from the upper side has been settled down, but he has a floating group right in the middle, with another couple of white stones cutting at K5. White, on his turn, has two groups of cuttings stones, one around K13 and the previously mentioned around K5. But there is something I’m missing in my description of the board: the aji of R7.

We’ve already talked about the relevance of aji and how to exploit it, but there is nothing better than watching an aji being used by dan players.

An aji which was removed and played a few moves later on, giving as a result the situation replayed on the right side of these lines. As you can see, white has pushed through R11 and black has defended the S11 stones by pushing white from below, expecting white to hit against an unbreakable wall: R8.
Due to the time settings, black wasn’t able to read what was going to happen within the next moves when he played S9. Can you spot the tesuji that white used? In fact, it’s very easy once you’ve spotted it, but I wonder what would happen if you encounter this situation on your blitz games, with just a few seconds per move and your opponent’s last moves have just been “pushing the borders” – style.

Well, all in all, taking into account the last events, I’d like to take a glance at the whole board, just to figure out how the game is developing. This is what we find:

Well, black settled in the upper and lower sides. White has the right side. White’s move 116 is a declaration of war against the central black group. Black happens to lengthen his agony by struggling through the G8 area, shortly before being cut by white, who is then cut by black elsewhere. Whatever, after a series of mutual I’ll-kill-you-before-you-kill-me moves which I can hardly follow, the board appears to be a complete mess:

Black is being encircled and he lacks of eyespace. The only remaining option, as seen in “Attack is the best form of defense“, is to kill the central white group around J 10. White tries to escape through the upper side of the board with move 150. But there is a tesuji which will make white stones die in vain, can you read it? It’s another sample of the inconvenience of playing empty triangles. So, it seems like the easy way to escape didn’t work out, lets look for the hard one.

This sequence, I must admit, is totally beyond my reading ability right now, I could have spend a dozen minutes looking at it and still wouldn’t get it. But it’s possible: white escaped through the lower side. On the thumbnail by the side, you have the answer to this tsumego, the hardest one of the day.

The cross marked stone was sacrificed as move 156, the starting move of the sequence and was captured with move 161.

Finally, while playing the yose, players tend to follow each others move when it’s sente. But there was a point where white didn’t play the expected move or, at least, the one I expected.

Which is the correct answer for black 257?

Ok, then, here I leave you with the full game, loaded into Eidogo. Enjoy it, and, please, comment on the post!!

[Embedded SGF File]

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Go game for Wii

alejo — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 19:01:29 +0000

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.

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