Alejo's Tenuki

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.

A few weeks ago we already announced the Android fever (what is android?) which was going on among the Go community. We made a small review on gobandroid, acego and koalago, leaving two more applications for a second review: KGS and Hubango.

Instead of reviewing these pieces of software, I’d like to comment on an uncommon application I found recently, its name: GOdroid.
GOdroid is the first published attempt to have an artificial intelligence on our mobile phones, it features GnuGo 3.8 with board sizes from 9×9 to 19×19 and handicap. According to the developer’s announcement the strength of this program ranges from 8k to 12k, which may pose a nice challenge when given handicap.Customizing the time limits would be a good feature for the next update, since increasing its thinking time limits would improve its strength. Personally, playing this engine on a desktop computer with longer time settings proves a nice challenge, while I can regularly beat this software on my Android.
What happens when this application is played on a more powerful device? Most mainstream android phones around have a core running at around 300-500 Mhz, but there are more powerful ones coming out such as Nexus one with 1 Ghz. Will the bot’s thinking time be reduced or the strength increased? If anyone wants to send me a Nexus One so that I can try it, contact me by email

When it comes to the interface, there aren’t any big innovations but the fact that it allows to play stones through 2 systems:
a) First tap on the screen to place, second to confirm.
b) Move the stone with the track ball and press it to confirm.
Personally, the best results are obtained by placing the stone with the finger and making small corrections or confirming with the track ball.

The applications is released as freeware and you can download it directly from your android market.

Update: as kaliya pointed out at the commentaries, GOdroid isn’t correctly displayed on phones with QVGA (320×240, such as HTC tattoo) or lower resolutions. Please, check your screen resolution if you find any problems with the board display. Other mainstream devices, such as HTC Dream or Magic, have a slightly higher resolution.

Android phones have already been around for a couple of years, but it wasn’t till a couple of months ago that it really got into the Go community. Android Go fever started with Wms announcing a KGS client for these mobile phones, which would be available in short term through the market. In November 2009 there were only two go applications available in the market; within 3 months the number of applications is, at least, three times. There is quite a wide range of features among these apps: IGS clients, KGS clients, just boards, just sgf viewers, clocks, freeware, shareware…

In order to let you know a few of them without making it too long, I decided to limit the reviewed software to freeware:

You may think that it’s a little bit confusing to record videos this way, but it’s incredible hard to actually record the android screen with software. In fact, by using this method, I let you see how does the touch screen work with go games, which is relevant when it comes to placing stones in a tiny board through a touch screen.

After a couple of games, the zooming-in method seems to work faster and is more useful for blitz games, but I’ve already made a few misplacing errors; so KGS’ method, while it seems less intuitive and slower, turns up to be more precise. Personally, I would stick to the KGS method till the other clients implement some sort of “undo” once the stone is played or “confirmatin button”. Unwillingly misplacing a stone is highly frustrating.

Further details:

Gobandroid	Acego	KoalaGo (free version)	Goigo	Go clock