Alejo's Tenuki

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.

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.

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!!

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.