Alejo's Tenuki

“Among the most basic of human needs is the need to connect with others. With a smile, a laugh, a whisper or a cheer, we connect with others every single day.

Today, the connections between people increasingly happen online. Yet the subtlety and substance of real-world interactions are lost in the rigidness of our online tools.

In this basic, human way, online sharing is awkward. Even broken. And we aim to fix it.

We’d like to bring the nuance and richness of real-life sharing to software. We want to make Google better by including you, your relationships, and your interests. And so begins the Google+ project: [...]“

This is extracted from google plus launch announcement. It’s been launched worldwide, inclucing the android app “Google+”, but it requires an invitation in order to be used. Luckily for me, I’ve got one, but it’s still a little bit empty.

Hope to see you soon!

Last week I was wandering around Go problems when I came across this one. It’s this specific kind of tsumegos I fail to solve – the ones that require for illogical reasoning.

After reading some useless sequences I usually end up giving it up, assuming there is no way to overcome that position. Go problems helps me as far as it forces me to look for a solution. A sequence which, if appeared during a game, I would have failed to solve.

Below these lines you have the tsumego as well as a few variations: Black to connect all three stones

As you can see, the solution is just plain easy. But I wouldn’t find it.

During last year, the number of devices featuring Android increased -almost- exponentially. Having each of them a different hardware, it was believed to be an advantage, since the user could choose among the different setups.

Different hardware also means different software versions. These started to be a pain in the “back” for developers, with 30% using Android 1.6, 30% using 2.1 and 20% version 2.2, we had to optimise our apps for each android version. Thus requiring us to create 3 version of the app or exclude the low end devices.

This year, most Android users have updated to Android 2.1 or 2.2. But Android’s fragmentation has become more apparent to the open public. Since it isn’t software, it has to be, forcefully, the hardware.

There are several processors around, but above all, different graphic cards: Adreno, Nvidia and Mali 400P.

While Mali 400P (only featured in Samsung Galaxy S 2, yet) only allows processing of standard compression of textures, Nvidia and Adreno support their own proprietary compression of textures. This means that only Nvidia users will play some games and only Adreno will play certain games. And Mali 400P won’t have any of them.

Though we expect Nvidia-exclusive games to be re-adapted for the main public -as well as Adreno’s-, we’ll have to wait for it and have faith in the developers. Developers who, by the way, have been paid extra money for using the proprietary compression of textures.

Certainly, I believed Android hardware fragmentation to be an avantage, since it allowed me to choose my setup. Currently, it’s a pain in my eye.

However, for those who are interested in avoiding proprietary compression, you can buy a Samsung Galaxy S 2 and use software decompression through “Chainfire’s 3D” or wait for some hacker to adapt these textures to the standards. You’ll require a rooted phone and a bit of patience. I can tell you I’m successfully playing some “proprietary-compression-textured” games in my SGS2, but some just won’t load.

During the last months I’ve been involved in creating a go club and teaching beginners. After a few weeks, we managed to get into a local event involving oriental culture. We managed to show our game and teach some unaware attendants. So our club grew… slightly.

One of the toughest tasks as the club teacher was to teach reading and I’m afraid I wasn’t successful. They’ve been playing against bots in order to get a basic grip on the game, but it seems like they haven’t really improved. Though club players seem to improve during the lessons and the games, they fail to improve their reading ability.

After spending some brainstorming, I found out that giving out problems to them would prove to be useful… I’m still to see the results.

Any piece of advice would be appreciated

During the last weeks, I’ve been involved in creating a Go club in my city. There’s two of us who already knew how to play and were ranked around 10k. The rest of the club members are newcomers into the Go world, varying from zero knowledge to 28 kyu.

When they asked for training I recommended getting a feeling on life-and-death against the computer (igowin, for example) and then moving on to a server like KGS. Sincerely, it was what I did a few years ago… and it wasn’t that bad

A couple of weeks later two club members were playing 9×9 with an awful botish style. Diagonal moves were all over the board, going unprotected and uncut. It took me a couple of games to realise that they had adopted this style as a logical defense against the computer.

Me: -Ok, so this works against igowin. What about humans?
Newb:-We can’t play against humans.
-Why? I told you to log in KGS and play there with 30k.
-We can’t, there aren’t such players there. We were forced to move to IGS and play on the lowest level.
-Wasn’t the lowest level on IGS 22k?
-Yes, it is. That’s why we’ve lost every single game there. So all that’s left if playing against igowin on our iphones.
-…(facepalm)

I couldn’t believe my ears, no newbies in KGS? Back when I learned, there were lots of players below the 25k level. The automatch feature should have made it easier for these people to play among them.  It should be simple to start an unranked account on KGS and play against 30k.

After discussing it for a while, they challenged me to start a new account on KGS and find 30k to play with. I tried. Twice. 30 minutes each time. I failed. Though there are some bots available for beginners, it’s quite difficult for a complete beginner to find an appropiate game. It seems like KGS population has matured, but it lacks newcomers. A few years ago I saw a graphic with KGS levels demography, I wonder how it would look like now.

So, if you’re reading this, Mat…, you’re right.

By the way, IGS, with 22k as the lowest level, it’s just a slaughter.

A couple of years ago I got to play Quatro. It’s a variation from the traditional 4 in a row game… played on a 4×4 board. So there must be something else in order to make it appealing, right? Of course there is… Actually, there ARE a couple of twists that make this game worth buying it (for a reasonable cost, not the one they’re asking for). The first one is simple: each piece has 4 different characteristics, i.e. shape, size, hollow and colour, and the winner just has to make 4 in a row in one of these characteristics. The second, and what impressed me the most since I had never thought of it, is that your opponent gives you the piece you should place on the board. So, it’s not a matter of being black vs white, since you can place any piece on board as long as your opponent has given it to you. Interesting, isn’t it?

Last week, thanks to my brother, I was introduced to another game featuring a similar mechanic. It’s called Kamisado. While the board may not look appealing after a quick glance, you’ll soon realise what lies beneath the colourful board. Once you move a tower and place it on a square, your opponents next move must be made with the tower of that colour. Easy, were I to move the my green tower into a orange square and now my opponent is forced to move the orange tower, and so on.

During the first game I just could glimpse the great strategy depth behind this first-unappealing colourful game. I hope to gain a deeper knowledge of this game in forthcoming weeks.