Alejo's Tenuki

Despite the lack of time to make proper reviews and comments, I ‘d like to let you know about a couple of projects which look quite promising for 2010:

-Kgs client for android phones.
-Go in google wave

Though these two projects started recently, they are improving at a fast pace, so I’d recommend tracking these posts.

A new Go Gadget is being developed by Bartmate and Szabo M. Peter, here you have the link to the homepage of the gadget: Game of Go. This information was brought to us by Andrew Smirnoff and Matias Sörlin was the first one to make it load publicly in Google wave.

Here you have a sample of what it looks like

Google wave is the new social network released by (guess who?) Google. It’s still quite premature and there are very few invitations sent, so the amount of users of this network is very limited.

Google wave has a big potential for many purposes, but we are here to talk about go.

In this picture you’ll see it is actually possible to load an SGF viewer. Only viewer, there is no way you can actually play with it. But it’s the first solution for Go players in Wave…

Updated: LOL, I managed to get a board working, it’s now playable. It’s playable but has a couple of bugs, which I don’t know how to solve…

Right now, I created a public wave with the result and instructions on how to create it: LINK

Today this thread has been started at GoDiscussions by a user called nchh. I’m unaware of predecessors, but it might be very interesting.
The first shining move they talk about are played in this awesome game:

The game has a few commentaries on the unforeseen shining moves, but the results are painfully obvious. Here you have the game loaded in EidoGo:

Since the network configuration at my job place is somewhat restrictive, all real-time servers such as KGS don’t work. The solution I came up with is playing through turn-based servers like Dragon Go Server.

Unfortunately, my account was created in 2006, as a 30k. And still has the same ranking. So I’m rapidly climbing in the ladder, but I’m just playing a very interesting game with a couple of life-and-death problems.

The game started very peacefully, both of us creating big moyos, which didn’t last too long before being invaded. My invasion seems to have reached success since it has been finally connected to a stone freely placed in tengen. But I felt a lot of pressure from my opponents attack, so I had to run for life…

His invasion is still on the go:

As you can see above, black is somewhat into trouble because of the surrounding white strength, but white does have some weaknes which could be exploited.

It took us over a day to make the last 15 moves, so most moves are well-thought. They may be wrong, but I’ve carefully thought about this situation.

The move sequence on the real game was this one:

As you can see, B 77, tried to connect and scape. B 81 created a possible ko-eye, which was turned into a false eye by W 82. This last move was unnecesarily answered with B83, since it was a bamboo joint and allowed me to make an extra move: W 84, and thus removing some extra eye space, but allowing black to take W 82 and convert the false eye into a real one.

After this exchange, black is trying to escape by peeping on a single jump. According to popular wisdom: “even a moron connects against a peep”, I happened to … block it on the other side… assuming there is more danger coming from the weak stones around O14.

Having never before played in a turn-based server, it seems like this players have a better level than an equal rating from KGS. Obviously, the amount of time given for each move in both servers isn’t as quite as the same, but I still can’t imagine a KGS 14k making me suffer like this when playing without handicap.

Though most people running on Windows won’t know anything about qgo, some of you may already know about it: it comes within Ubuntu’s default package.
The next version of this program is already under development and it looks like a good tool for online playing.

General interface:

The general interface is very clean. There are a few icons on the left, which will intuitively guide you to your desired path. You can either play online, create or review sgf files, play against gnu go and configure a few options of the program. Since it’s a pre-beta version, the amount of variables which can be modified through the main menu still is somewhat short, but we expect it to grow within the next versions.

In-Game and Graphics

Here you have an image of how the board looks like. As you can see, it resembles the plain 2D version of panda-glgo, which is due to the fact that panda-glgo was actually developed from the first qgo… Well, the stone slate-and-shell graphics and the board are ok, the icons are small compared to other programs, but big enough to not having to worry about it. The upper space could be used to place some of the lateral icons and thus make them bigger

Go Servers:

Here it comes, the big feature of this program: it is able to connect to IGS, WING, LGS, CyberOro, eWeiQi, Tygem and Tom servers. Currently IGS games can be played without any trouble or, at least, I did. Since IGS is among the most used servers, its developer is focusing on improving the IGS experience and thus leaving the other servers as only “watchable”. I happened to succesfully watch a few games in Tygem and CyberOro.

Conclusion

QGo2 seems to be a very good tool for people who like moving from one server to another looking for new challenges. It is definitelly going to be an important tool for Unix users, since we don’t have many tools so powerful.

Last news: The developer of the program has allowed me to resend you information about compiling and executing the program. If you want to test it, contact me at alejostenuki AT gmail DOT com and I’ll send you the instructions.