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Hi everybody, there are a group of go players here on SA who like to post a thread once in a while to try to get fresh blood. Here is the newest iteration of that thread!! GO is a cool game of strategy which a lot of people compare to chess but really there's no point in doing that they are both cool but completely different. The rules are exceptionally simple but the game itself is immensely complex. I would write them here but the wikipedia article on the game has done an excellent job summarizing them as well as including a nice history of the game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28board_game%29 We all play on KGS, the best Go server. You can find the client at http://www.gokgs.com. We meet in room ITGO, found in the social room category. You will have to post in this thread with your KGS username to get access to the room. There are usually a few of us on at any time, so please drop by and we will be glad to play a game with you, whether you are already an experienced player or just starting. If you have any questions about the game or just want to discuss it we'll also be happy to talk about Go here in this thread! There is an irc thing here: irc://irc.synirc.net/itgo https://kiwiirc.com/client/irc.synirc.net/itgo EDIT: the irc is gone. maybe this discord chat will be good: https://discord.gg/3bKXUzb Want to hear the stones in KGS client but no stone sound? Try this post for the stone sound. A BETTER POST FROM THE PRESENT oiseaux morts 1994 posted:I'm gonna post this in here for archival purposes since the old thread is gonna die. Edited discord invite to be fresh in 2020 still here dang sensual donkey punching fucked around with this message at 00:36 on Aug 24, 2020 |
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# ? Feb 15, 2025 14:48 |
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Don't bother trying to get into it if you don't like to lose though. There's a Go proverb that's something like "you have to lose 100 games before you're even a beginner." It is a difficult game to get into but very rewarding.
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I used to play a little Go, and really enjoyed it. The worst bit, though, was when I played a game with someone around 15 ranks above me (I was 23 kyu, he was 8,) and not only did he beat me effortlessly, he couldn't even explain what I was doing wrong in a way that I could understand. Like, I'd place a stone, and he'd say "no, not there! Can't you see how bad the form is?" Well, no, I couldn't see how bad the form was. And unfortunately, he couldn't express it in a less arcane way. That's the really frustrating (and also cool) thing about Go: it's really difficult to explain good play principles. Everyone kind of has to experience them for themselves, I guess.
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He should have been able to explain it to you, although 23ks are very beginner. Once you get to 15k or so things become more easily explained. Read web tutorials until things begin making sense.
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I love Go, but I am absolutely terrible at it; I get crushed by people that also are just learning the game. It's very ![]()
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It's a fun game - I recently bought a board and started playing. I'm not good by any metric, but I noticed it took about five-six games to start even seeing when my pieces were going to be captured. So if anyone starts playing because of this thread, don't give up just because you get constantly captured - you'll start seeing them eventually!
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I play on KGS as Scatter 3d and am completely willing to play some teaching games with beginners or lower ranked players. The OP is a really great teacher and is a 2d, so hit him up. There are a number of 4 kyuish players who I'm sure would also be willing to play. So stop by and play a game of go. Also as this is an Ask/Tell feel free to ask questions about anything like tournaments, experiences with the game, etc. Some of us are in the American Go Association (or the Canadian or European) and have played at big tournaments etc. I myself have never played in a tournament or anything but I have made several trips to a dedicated go club where every member is a 40 year old+ Korean, very few of whom speak English.
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Sweet! I used to play Go back in high school, but I haven't really played a game for a couple years. I'm definitely gonna get in on this!
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http://playgo.to/interactive/ Here's the best introduction to the game and http://senseis.xmp.net/?BeginnerStudySection read through some of this once you start to play
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Let's suppose I don't want to kidnap Melinda Gates for the ransom. How do I afford a decent set? I don't suppose anyone has the secret black market cheap import hookup?
McNerd fucked around with this message at 21:50 on Jul 2, 2008 |
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http://www.ymimports.com/ This store offers cheap and decent sets. There are cheaper places out there (especially ebay) but I can't vouch for the quality of their products.
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sensual donkey punching posted:http://www.ymimports.com/ Vouching for this site. I have a set from here, and it's quite nice, and was very affordable. Also, getting in on joining this. I'm gsage on KGS, and about 15k. Commander Quack fucked around with this message at 17:59 on Jul 3, 2008 |
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It's been a while since I've played, I ought to get in on this. Go is an incredibly Kinda hijacking the thread a bit, but what do you guy's think of my mypic32 contest entry, from an end-user's point of view? It's been a few years since I've played, but I think it would be a cool application if I can 1) get it to work right and 2) make the board look good/presentable. I know its not traditional, but this is the 21st century, amirite? I can't help but feel like I'm missing some features or abilities that would be useful.
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I've been trying to learn Go with my friends using a chessboard and checkers pieces. Not an ideal setup. I'm happy to see other people here interested in it, and I'll be bugging people on the SA Go server to teach me how to play whenever I have some free time. I have no advice for other beginners, because I'm a newbie myself, but it really is an amazingly deep game.
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Delta-Wye posted:It's been a while since I've played, I ought to get in on this. Go is an incredibly maybe throw in a network stack and write an IGS client for it and you've got a very cool piece of hardware
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quote:In 2 player mode, the PIC32 simply stores the game state, applies life/death rules, and tracks captured stones. This mode should be relatively easy to code. The life/death rules are surprisingly difficult to code and shouldn't be part of your project if you aren't programming the bot either. I think your project would be a cool set up if I could use it as an input for kgs or some other online play but otherwise it is only moderately interesting. I've been playing go for about 7 years and I'm one of the semi-regular players on KGS. My rank has been 4k for the past year or two but one of these days I'm going to study and get better or something. Go is a really fun game.
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sensual donkey punching posted:maybe throw in a network stack and write an IGS client for it and you've got a very cool piece of hardware That would be loving pimp, and at this point I'm looking for more of a 'dream sheet' than a list of functions. I'll probably write this up and add it. Gimpy Joe posted:The life/death rules are surprisingly difficult to code and shouldn't be part of your project if you aren't programming the bot either. I think your project would be a cool set up if I could use it as an input for kgs or some other online play but otherwise it is only moderately interesting. I haven't written the code yet, but honestly it doesn't seem like it will be that hard. I'll keep your comment in mind though 'cause there is nothing worse than being blindsided by a hard part of a project that you expected to be easy. Thanks for the feedback guys! The KGS idea is pretty good.
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delta, solutions of life & death problems is something in the region of NP-complete (http://www.springerlink.com/content/vh10b97tyvxtf1wr/ supposedly proves this for a restricted sort of L&D problem). it's best to leave marking dead & live groups during scoring to a human, if that's what you meant in your spec (which isn't clear). in any case, i hope you make a new thread about it if you ever build this, and maybe post about it on godiscussions.com too. i'm sure most go players would be interested in seeing a high-tech goban, you might even be approached for a commission
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sensual donkey punching posted:delta, solutions of life & death problems is something in the region of NP-complete (http://www.springerlink.com/content/vh10b97tyvxtf1wr/ supposedly proves this for a restricted sort of L&D problem). it's best to leave marking dead & live groups during scoring to a human, if that's what you meant in your spec (which isn't clear). in any case, i hope you make a new thread about it if you ever build this, and maybe post about it on godiscussions.com too. i'm sure most go players would be interested in seeing a high-tech goban, you might even be approached for a commission When I say life/death rules, I mean checking liberties and acting appropriately. From a bookkeeping standpoint - you play a piece, it parses the board looking for situations where pieces need to be removed (aka, you make a capture). That should be easy. As far as counting the score at the end, I didn't even think of that as a hard job. It's embarrassingly been a couple years since I played, but I thought it was as simple as looking to see if an unplayed intersection is surrounded by one color or between two different colors, and tallying appropriately. This also shouldn't be hard, assuming I haven't missed anything. Actually playing the game (deciding if a group is alive or dead, and if it can be killed, how to do it, etc) is way beyond what I want to accomplish - hence my desire to port GNU Go to make the job possible. If porting that gets out of hand, that feature will more likely be dropped than implemented by me.
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How convenient! I played Go a bit in high school, mainly against people I knew at the time shortly after I taught them the rules. It's been several years and I hadn't played at all until recently when I decided to get back into it. I'm on KGS under the name "ryanodine", but with only four games total played on the server (three against bots, I'm a 21k? right now). Haven't checked out the SA room yet but maybe I will sometime. I can also vouch for Yellow Mountain Imports. I just recently ordered a complete game set from them and everything went smoothly. Their customer service is amazing and fast: they sent me more stones when my set was a few short (less than an hour after I e-mailed about it) and when my board arrived with some minor manufacturing defects, they mailed me a new one and told me to keep the first. (I suppose I'll have to buy a second set of stones and bowls to go with it.) They also have an e-bay page where you can buy superficially damaged merchandise at very low prices. Glad to see a thread about this go up. I'd been doubtful about the presence of a SA Go community.
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There have been several mentions of bots in this thread but I really feel like it is more fun and better for learning to play against humans of any rank. I've been playing for quite a while and at some point I played bots pretty exclusively but I didn't really get any better because they don't know how to play and the games weren't very complicated or interesting. Anyway - go rules and you should play it against people.
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I'm pretty bored and always willing to try and recruit people to the world of Go so if you're interested I'd be happy to try and show you the ropes. Join the SA room!
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Delta-Wye posted:It's been a while since I've played, I ought to get in on this. Go is an incredibly I have a feeling that a microcontroller is going to have serious issues running a Go AI. I wrote one a few years ago. I started with simple minimax, and eventually wrote an alpha-beta pruning algorithm. Even with as much optimization as I managed, a Pentium 4 would take as long as a minute to choose a move if it was looking seven moves into the future. There are several really good Go AIs online, and some are open source. Maybe you can port one to the PIC. Edit: I just read your website again and noticed that you already chose an AI to port. Oh well. I still think you're not going to be able to look more than a handful of moves into the future in a reasonable amount of time, which will make for a pretty weak AI. Good luck, though!
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Awesome, I'll have to check this out. Really have no idea how good I am, since I just play with friends, but I guess I'll find out. (Expectation: not very good) Do any of you guys play training games, or give lessons? That would be awesome. Edit: I'm jkomisarof on KGS Komisar fucked around with this message at 21:43 on Jul 3, 2008 |
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yes, we're happy to play and review games
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I have always wanted to play Go after watching all of Hikaru no Go. I've tried a couple of times, I just don't understand how the game works at all. Maybe this thread will invigorate me.
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I tried to get into this last time there was a Go thread, but I fell out of it. Looks like a good time to give it another try.
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Baelfael posted:I love Go, but I am absolutely terrible at it; I get crushed by people that also are just learning the game. It's very i just noticed this post was pretty much skipped over. besides coming to kgs and getting some teaching from whoever is on, http://senseis.xmp.net/ is a good wiki about go. it's seen better years, but all the old pages are still full of good content. your main problem might be finding pages suitable for your skill level, since they aren't organized very well that way, but if you enjoy reading there's a lot of stuff there to grab your attention, both about the game and the history of the game
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Holy crap, go! I used to play this years ago all the time and was something around 11k in AGA. I should start playing again.
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As an update, there is a visible difference in the amount of people online, even at weird times, it's pretty easy to find a game and everyone, even the pubbies, are fairly welcoming. Come play Go!
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Baelfael posted:I love Go, but I am absolutely terrible at it; I get crushed by people that also are just learning the game. It's very http://gtl.xmp.net/ Guo Juan's 1 Euro Go lectures seem pretty good too, although if youre below 15k then youre probably better off just reading GTL, sensei's, and some maybe basic books. Do problems too, thats quite important. http://www.audiogolessons.com/
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As I understand it, the absurd amount of possible plays is the reason there's no Go AI, is this right? Because I'd like to have a computer opponent to train on every once in a while but it seems we'll have to wait for quantum computers for that.
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Two Percent posted:As I understand it, the absurd amount of possible plays is the reason there's no Go AI, is this right? Because I'd like to have a computer opponent to train on every once in a while but it seems we'll have to wait for quantum computers for that. There are Go AIs. They are far, far worse comparitively than chess AIs; the best one is 4 kyu, if I remember correctly, which is well shy of Master status. It's still infinitely better than most of us will ever be, though.
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some interesting reading about the state of (and predictions for) go ai http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/oct07/5552
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A year ago I played my way to around 15-12k and regularly played against some dan players in a nearby cafe. It's quite true what they say, impossible to win unless they have a very high handicap. Also had the luck to play (and learn from) against Chizu Kobayashi (professional japanese player), she was very nice and supportive while she won every single game by a landslide. I remember the entire go club teaming up against her with a max handicap, they all still lost. I stopped playing since then though. Can't concentrate enough to play. ![]() Also go AI are far weaker than some people in this thread make it out to be, after 1-2 months of play you can easily consistently win against all of them.
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some really, really recent developments in go ai have given mogobot, which actually plays around 3 - 2 kyu on kgs. of course every bot has its achilles heel, but mogobot plays in a global way far in advancement of any other bot
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Yo woss, just letting you know I am still reading your books and didn't give up on Go.
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I personally expect Go to be solved by impossible bots within our lifetime. Computing power is one of the main items holding it back. Once Chess is mastered by AI, people will turn their sights to Go for a challenge in computing.
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How long does the typical game last?
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# ? Feb 15, 2025 14:48 |
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belt posted:How long does the typical game last? Anywhere from 20 minutes to 2 hours. It depends on how long you like to think to be honest. I prefer 30 minutes on each side with 5 30 second countdowns (byo-yomis). Others like 5 minutes a side with 5 second byo-yomis. I'd say 20 minutes per side is about average, which equals to about 45 minutes total for a good thinking game. The time flies by too.
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