
Ask HN: Who Plays Go? - thangalin
I play on http://www.gokgs.com/ sometimes, with the same name.<p>I'm not super incredible (maybe 2 dan). At my peak, when I was studying in Japan, I was close to 5 dan. A week before leaving Kyoto, I hooked up with a buddy (who was also visiting) to challenge the locals at a smoke-filled Go club. He was perhaps 2 dan at the time. We walked in and slaughtered the room. They could not match us. Ah, but they insisted we return the following evening.<p>We did.<p>Waiting for us were some of their strongest players. I was seated in front of Kyoto's most ruthless amateur player, who must have been a scrappy 7 dan. He was a squat old man with grizzly eyes and a staunch, "I'm gonna' mess you up" attitude. The desire for revenge in his gaze was unmistakable.<p>The knives came out, we threw down dragon after dragon, chase after chase, launching attack and counter-attack, the board was intense. Eyes of groups were abandoned, trades were made, and the shrewdness of his plays were like his gaze. In the end he won four out of five games, and I learned a lesson in humility. It was a great experience, would do it again in an eye-blink.<p>Go is such an amazing game, with a rich history, pervasive through Asia, and unsuspecting in its simplicity. It's also a great way to make friends around the world, and meet some truly remarkable people.<p>Any dan players care for a game?
======
Kilimanjaro
Your intro read like prose. In a few short paragraphs I felt I was reading a
novel.

You have the touch. Are you a professional writer?

~~~
yaskyj
Not sure what you mean by prose. His writing was prose, so was yours.

~~~
crux
You're right about his semantic mix-up, but surely you knew exactly what he
meant.

------
nandemo
Do not play go. Just stay away it from it. I started to play go in Brazil
while in high school and got addicted to it. Eventually I came to Japan to
play go (I won't disclose the details because it'd be really embarrassing).

Later I came to Japan to study Computer Go in grad school. I planned to to
stay for 2~3 years. It's been 7 years now. I don't play go anymore, but I do
harder stuff (karaoke, clubbing, etc). It's been a sort of gateway drug for
me.

PS: by the way, the reason an American 2-dan can slaughter a Japanese 2-dan is
simply because the scales are different, mainly due to inflation in Japanese
ranks. If you're AGA 2-dan (or say, European 1-dan) you should really upgrade
yourself to 4-dan when coming to Japan.

~~~
eob
It sounds like a good story waiting to be told, not embarrassing. So many of
our lives are spent following the path society has carved out for us; it's
refreshing and interesting to hear about someone who had a desire outside of
the mainstream and followed to an extreme.

Did you join one of the go cram schools?

------
mark_l_watson
In the late 1970s I played both the women's world champion, and a year later
the South Korean national champion in exhibition games. They both mentioned
that I was about 2 kyu but experience getting bruised up by an 2 dan amateur
makes me think that my rating is less than that - so I would not be a good
opponent for you.

My older brother taught me to play when I was eight, and we played fairly
equally for about 10 years, Then, within a year's time, I was consistently
giving him 9 stones.

Also in the late 1970s, I wrote a Go playing program I called Honnibo Warrior
which played poorly. I sold it cheaply for the Apple II (written in UCSD
Pascal) and actually made some real money selling the source code.

~~~
thangalin
I've had a design in the works for a few years that is a completely network-
based Go AI. The idea is nothing new. It involves multiple computers, each
assigned one problem from a board position. One computer might be responsible
for calculating ladders, one solves tsumego problems, one to look at
influence, one to apply joseki, another for yose, and so forth. Each of
submits their top ten moves, in the allotted time, to a master engine. The
master engine evaluates the moves (possibly using Monte Carlo simulations) and
selects the best.

The idea was more about the framework than the actual worker machines. The
ability to add and remove different problem solvers on the fly appealed to me.
One of the problem solvers, for example, could be your program, or GNU Go, or
a program that runs ten Go playing AIs simultaneously, returning the "best"
move from each.

~~~
joshstrike
Wow. I really dig this idea of sharded / modular network problem solvers. It
would be interesting to take it a step further and let the solvers themselves
negotiate their own distribution over time, CPU use, etc. - e.g. replicate all
the active solvers on all the clients but allocate chunks of variable size to
each depending on which evolves to be the "dominant" solver on any given CPU.
You'd need an algorithm to stop Montecarlos from becoming the dominant process
everywhere, probably. Montecarlo is notorious for chewing up a processor, but
in various applications it often does not need to be run constantly, so the
free cycles could be used for something else.

I especially like the idea that this could be applied to anything, not just
Go. I did something in this direction a few years ago with an a-life data
processing platform that used SOAP to shard problems to groups of machines.

At that point there are two issues, firstly the protocol becomes a bottleneck
if you're dealing in large datasets, and secondly if you're dividing something
up spatially you still have to aggregate your results. It would be the same if
you divided it problematically for Go moves, unless each algorithm could give
a "confidence" indicator that could be used reliably so that the master engine
would not have to montecarlo each result set. That could be done if the
montecarlo was moved to the sub-servers to test their own moves before sending
the moves back complete with percentage wins for direct comparison in the
master engine. It would chew up a lot more cycles and mean more machines, but
it would remove the post-processing bottleneck.

~~~
thangalin
Architecture in a nutshell:

<http://i.imgur.com/IZ52u.png>

A list of 10 moves from 30 different machines, even using a heavy-weight
protocol like SOAP, would be nearly instantaneous. I would favour a light-
weight format such as JSON, though. For other applications, I agree, network
bandwidth would be a possible bottleneck.

My initial idea was to have each engine return ten moves, in sequence, with
the first move being most important. The moves need not be delivered
simultaneously. The Master selects the lowest scoring move that was picked by
multiple engines. Other ideas include weighting (the fuseki engine's input is
not very important in chuban or yose), and imperative moves (death engine
forces a play to save a 30 point group).

The Master would send requests for moves by submitting a board position and
whose turn to play.

What I really like about the idea, though, is that anyone could develop an
engine (in any language) that adheres to the protocol, and add it to the AI
network. At any time.

P.S.

<http://www.whitemagicsoftware.com/software/java/jigo/>

~~~
joshstrike
Cool stuff. Do you already have an API for people to write their own solvers
-- something that passes a board state and an interface to return ranked
choices? How do you stop people on the network from overranking their own AI's
choices (assuming this were an open project)?

~~~
thangalin
I do not have an API for solvers. There would have to be a registration
system, possibly white-listed by IP address.

------
sams99
I used to be 2-4k but had trouble holding 5k* on igs a few years ago. If I
started playing now I would probably struggle holding 8k.

Life, my daughter, 2 personal projects and work got in the way.

I miss the social aspect of Go, I find the internet incarnations are too
sterile. I love having a tea and a chat while playing, I spend enough time
staring at the screen.

Would probably play again if I found the right group.

Pushing the upper kyus would require way too much work than I am willing to
commit at the moment to the game.

Love Go, it is truly eye opening.

Talking about smoke, my Go teacher "Mr No" used to smoke 200 cigarettes a day
in Go clubs in Korea.

~~~
thangalin
That's crazy!

The scene here fizzled a bit when a few events happened around the same time,
involving babies and our strongest players. I much prefer to play in person
than online, for the same reasons you mentioned.

I am planning on taking a trip next year, with a stop in Korea. Any
recommendations for (smoke-free) Go clubs?

------
RiderOfGiraffes
I was once 11 kyu and improving, but I realised I was getting totally absorbed
in the game. As a latent obsessive compulsive I gave it up. I'm pretty sure it
was the right choice, but I retain deep respect and admiration for the game.
Far, far better than chess.

Deep down I wish I still played ...

~~~
ludwig
You made the right choice :)

I got to about 7 kyu, and then it suddenly hit me. Balance is key. Therefore
you should concentrate on those aspects of your life which have become more
urgent. I haven't played very much after that realization.

In my view, Go (or any other hobby, really) would stand in one corner of the
board. Your family, personal life, and work would be at the other three
corners. As the situation on the board evolves, you would choose your best
play. Focusing too much on any one area would leave you over-concentrated. It
would be too inefficient. You'd easily secure one corner but lose the other
three.

But then, if you spread yourself too thin all over the place, trying to please
everyone, including yourself, that would leave you with a vulnerable position
that could fall apart at any moment. That's clearly not good either.

However, if you patiently settle your stone formations before moving on the
next area, if you gain strength in one corner/side before expanding towards
another, if you are fluid in your decision making process when choosing a
direction (life does throw you stumbling blocks doesn't it?), THEN you'd be a
wise man indeed :)

I do make it a point to participate in a local yearly tournament (five games
over two days) whether I feel ready or not. One day, though, I will come back
to Go in full-force.

I'm also ludwig on KGS, btw. If anyone fancies a game, you can always reach me
via twitter (@ludwig1024).

~~~
seigenblues
With all due respect, I don't think it was the right choice at all. As I've
studied go, I've learned large "life lessons" in an almost 1-to-1
correspondence. Even now, having hit diminishing returns at 5d, I still find
it to be a wonderful exercise in metacognition; I can play a game to quickly
see where my head's at.

That's certainly not how everyone looks at the game, but for me, go is easily
the most enriching subject of study.

Just my 2c!

~~~
alan-crowe
I've tried to make one of these life lessons explicit, answering a question on
Reddit
[http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/c1fb7/hey_ratheism_...](http://www.reddit.com/r/atheism/comments/c1fb7/hey_ratheism_how_you_do_you_come_to_terms_with/c0plymp)

How do you come to terms with death?

Learn to play Go. The game has an opening, a middle-game, and an end-game. You
can take them as metaphors for the stages of life.

The opening involves playing in the corners and around the edges of the board,
perhaps on the third line emphasising territory, or on the fourth line
emphasing influence. Metaphorically this is childhood and education. Perhaps
going for a vocational qualification, such accounting or law is like going for
territory, while studying philosophy or travelling round the world is like
going for influence. Or perhaps such direct parallels are over-literal. The
opening moves in a game are worse than difficult; the opening is down-right
mysterious. Which makes it a lot like growing up. And it creates a situation
as you enter the middle game that is different in every game. Much as every
adult has their own baggage left over from childhood.

Perhaps the middle game is like adult life because things keep going wrong.
Your opponent invades your territory or steals the eyes from a group. You have
to fight back, invade his territory or sacrifice a weak group. Adult life
makes similiar demands on your flexibility and fighting spirit. If you lose
your job perhaps you can find a new one with a rival company for more pay. Or
change career and become happier.

The middle game may see victory or defeat, just as life may come to a
premature end in illness or death. Often though one survives to the end game.
The boundaries of the territories must be decided and there is still time for
ingenuity and an upset. It is the time of memoirs and collected works, of
playing with grand-children and of making partial amends for past errors.

If you play in tournaments there is a clock, but it is set to 1 hour, not
seventy years. There is time to think about your opening, to estimate the
score and plan a path in the middle game, to look for some clever moves and to
save time here and there with the obvious safe play. After 40 minutes you can
estimate the score again. If you think you are ahead you can try to hold onto
your lead through the end game. If you think you are behind you must chose
between trying to catch up with some clever end game moves or perhaps a do or
die invasion. Time matters. If you are short of time you will be unlikely to
be able to think for long enough to come up with clever moves. But you should
be ahead, having put the time to good use earlier.

Tournament play with 1 hour instead of 70 years is the heart of the metaphor.
Both the game and real life have a narrative arc and time limits. You have to
manage your time and act your age, taking the big points in the opening and
leaving the end-game moves for the end-game, if you make it that far.

So my advice is practical advice and not the uplifting advice that you
requested. It emphasises the practical issue of getting the hang of managing a
limited stock of time.

------
Morendil
Stuck at 2kyu on KGS for two years, I've set the game aside temporarily, until
my life situation is such that I can immerse myself in serious study. Love the
game - got half a shelf of books including Invincible.

There's a saying, "Go is life". Learning the game will tell you an incredible
amount about yourself, about determinism and chance and skill, about depth and
limits and building knowledge and passing on knowledge.

For a software person there is a lot to learn about complexity and patterns.
There are deep lessons about not fooling yourself, about the idea that a
strategy for success emerges in surprising ways from ridiculously simple rules
and facts of the underlying material.

There isn't much of a gap between Go's simple rules (alternating play,
capture, ko) and software's fundamental elements (sequence, iteration, choice)
in terms of simplicity, and likewise these simple rules combine to yield
complexities that challenge the best human minds.

~~~
thangalin
Hurdling the kyu wall, for me, required a leap of insight into understanding
how to use thickness for attacking. The basic idea you probably already
understand: when you have a wall (or otherwise fortified position), drive your
opponent's weak forces into that area. As you do so you will get another wall.
If this wall faces your own position, great! If it faces an enemy position, a
wall gives you the opportunity to invade or reduce the op-position.

Go beautifully combines strategy and tactics. In what other board games can
you take a strategy like, "Besiege Wei To Rescue Zhao" and implement it,
tactically, in various ways?

I had a conversation with a project manager. He said that we should zip the
development source files over to the test machine. I suggested that the test
machine should be outfitted with the repository client (CVS) because it would
be simpler solution, technically. How the goal is accomplished is not nearly
as important as the goal itself. Both zipping the source and executing a "cvs
update" solve the problem. And both are tactical ways of solving the strategic
problem: test the latest development version in an isolated environment that
is similar to production.

In "Besiege Wei To Rescue Zhao" the strategic concept is to parry an attack on
your forces by attacking a weak (yet slightly more valuable) enemy force. I
like to think of it as the Three Kingdoms problem. Kingdom A and B are
friends, but not Kingdom C. When Kingdom C attacks Kingdom B, Kingdom A can
rescue B in two ways: running to B's defense or by counter-attacking Kingdom
C. Counter-attacking is usually best, to avoid the least amount of bloodshed.
After you've attacked a weak opponent group, you've managed to create a
stronger position that you can leverage to support the group that was being
assailed.

Other elements that Go and programming have in common: intuition, aesthetics,
and recursion.

------
kia
By the way Go is one of the most challenging games for AI:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go>

------
gjm11
I play, but not nearly often enough. I'm probably somewhere around 12k, far
below _thangalin_ 's level. If there is any such thing as objective quality in
board games, go is objectively the best game anyone has come up with yet.
Wonderful, wonderful game. But also dangerously addictive. The fact that it's
basically impossible to play a quick game doesn't help.

~~~
edanm
"there is any such thing as objective quality in board games, go is
objectively the best game anyone has come up with yet"

Could you please elaborate?

~~~
gjm11
I'm not sure I could. (If I could, I'd probably be able to omit the hedge at
the start.) But here's the best I can do.

1\. The rules of go are very simple. (Well, kinda. Use, say, the Tromp-Taylor
ruleset.)

2\. The resulting game is very subtle, in e.g. the following senses. (a) For
any game, define an "increment" to be how much better you need to be than
someone else in order to beat them 75% of the time. Then the number of
increments between a total beginner and God is larger for go than for any
other game I know of. (b) Same as (a), but this time define an "increment" to
be how much better you can get with a week's hard work or something. -- That
is, there's a lot to learn, and learning it really makes you appreciably
better at the game.

3\. The difficulty of the game isn't simply a matter of getting better at
mechanical calculations: there's a whole lot of strategy and "good taste" and
so on.

4\. It seems to be an uncommonly _beautiful_ game. Now, any good game is going
to have some aesthetic appeal for its expert players. But it seems as if (a)
really good go players get more out of it aesthetically than, say, really good
chess players get out of chess, and (b) one starts seeing aesthetic value in
the game earlier in the process of getting better than with most other games.

5\. (This is, I think, mostly a consequence of #1.) It's a very flexible game:
you can use a different size of board (changing how long a game takes and the
tactics/strategy balance), or give one player a handicap (changing the balance
between the two) while keeping the game substantially the same. This is
convenient practically, and (for reasons I can't currently articulate) it
seems to me that it indicates something deeper about the game: it's a kind of
Platonic essence that can be instantiated in many different ways. (I wonder
occasionally about playing go on a graph that isn't just a square grid. It
seems like hexagonal go wouldn't be too big a stretch, whereas to make a
decent hexagonal chess game you have to change lots and lots of things.)

6\. (Related to #1, #4 and #5.) It's a game that can be played with enjoyment
even by total beginners: it's much more approachable than chess, for instance.

7\. Although there's a lot to learn about the game, the understanding:brute-
facts ratio in what you need to learn is better than in, say, chess. You can
play go very well while knowing scarcely any detailed opening theory, whereas
to be any good at chess you need to learn a lot of lines.

~~~
edanm
Wow. Superb answer, just what I was looking for. I'd actually heard your point
2 repeated several times, so I guess it's a common idea.

By the way, one of the reasons I "like" Go (in a purely objective, looking
from a distance without learning it kinda way) is that, from what I've heard,
even average players can beat computers at the game. Obviously, this is mostly
to do with accidental, mechanical facts about number of possible moves, but in
an age where Chess has been "won" by computers, it is something of an appeal
for me. Do actual Go players feel the same way?

~~~
realitygrill
Last I remember, most programs could play about 12-10kyu evenly and some
specially augmented ones had hit dan levels.

Computer moves always looked unnatural to me, though, and you could often
exploit this easily. I'd say most players are at least comforted by lack of
computer headway into Go.

------
kapilkaisare
I was entranced with go via "Hikaru No Go", a Japanese anime about a boy who
discovers the game through a spirit seeking the elusive 'hand of God'. I am
currently at 9 kyu but am trying to better my game.

Unfortunately there aren't too many Go players where I am, and this makes Go
as a point of social focus difficult, as it often is in chess over here.

~~~
ludwig
> Unfortunately there aren't too many Go players where I am

Put yourself on the map, just in case! <http://igolocal.net/>

~~~
muloka
Unfortunately this site doesn't accept my position. I keep getting the
following:

You must mark a valid location on the Google Map.

I currently live in Bermuda and if there are any Go players out there
traveling to or currently residing there I'd be down for a few games, I have a
go board + stones.

------
igravious
Hi thangalin,

I'm "grooviest" on KGS. I'm only 7 kyu so you'll need to up-skill me to 1 dan
so I can give you a nice game (hint hint). My relationship with Go is
turbulent. Currently we are in an addictive (God, it's sooo addictive) phase
and she is breaking my heart. My one regret in life is that I was 30 years old
before I learned how to play. All those wasted years playing chess. _sigh_ I
recently moved from my native land of Ireland to snowy central Finland and one
of the first things I did was find me a Go club - hello the Tengen Go Club of
Jyväskylä, nice people all round.

~~~
thangalin
That's quite the adventure! Our time zones might not let us play in real time.
Facebook has a Go playing app. I'd be happy to play a teaching game with you.

------
edanm
I've never played, but I'd be happy if someone could point me to the best
place to learn.

~~~
muloka
Easiest way to pick up the basic rules and gameplay is through:

The Interactive Way to Go: <http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/>

Its also available in 32 other languages: <http://playgo.to/iwtg/>

\--

Beyond that I recommend 9x9 games, on Windows download yourself a free copy of
iGoWin: <http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html> or on OSX or Linux check out
GnuGo.

\--

There's also a Linux live cd/distro with lots of learning tools by the name of
Hikarunix: <http://senseis.xmp.net/?Hikarunix>

~~~
muloka
p.s.: You can find me on KGS, my user name is muloka. I'm just starting to
break the 5k boundary.

------
cageface
It's a fascinating game but coding seems to fatigue the same bits of my brain
that coding does, so I spend my recreational time doing things a bit more
brainless, like Warcraft.

------
gcao
Hi thangalin,

Nice to see your post about Go. I'm from China and have been playing Go for
more than 20 years. I started to play in high school and improved a lot in
college. My current ranking is AGA 5~6D. I don't play very often recently
except play turn-based games on my own web site (www.go-cool.org).

Because of my addiction to the game, I even created a variation of Go, Daoqi,
which removes border of Go board and makes all positions have same importance.
This new game gives players a new and different enjoyment.

I'm also a programmer and have spent a lot of time on side projects. I created
a Javascript based game viewer (github.com/gcao/jsgameviewer), a Ruby on Rails
application which integrates with a Go forum (<http://www.go-cool.org/app>)

Like I said, I'm happy to see your post and comments from fellow Go players.
Hope I can play with you one day.

~~~
gastlygem
哈,我一定在tom論壇見過你!

------
swah
Care to explain why your level decreases without practice?

~~~
thangalin
Go is deep. So deep that you could spend a lifetime studying only to yourself
on your deathbed still discovering new techniques and concepts.

The first ability people tend to lose after not playing is reading. That is,
visualising a sequence of moves (without playing them) on the board and
judging the positional value (similar to chess, but with astronomically more
possibilities). Reading requires concentration, pattern matching (shape,
tesuji, vital points), and guesswork.

After reading -- the tactical part -- some higher-level concepts get lost.
Forcing plays (kikashi), inducing moves, estimating the value of thickness,
obscure joseki, fuseki theory, and more.

There are /so/ many concepts and techniques to Go that unless you are actively
studying and playing, it is nearly impossible to keep everything at the
forefront of your mind.

------
clvv
I lived in China during my childhood, and one of the things that I was
involuntary involved in was playing Go, my parents simply made me do it.
Despite the fact that I didn't really like it, I still kept learning it for
several year. And by the time when I finally convinced my parents that I was
not going to or even want to be a professional Go player, I was amateur 4 dan
by Chinese standard, and I was about 10 years old. I stopped playing since
then, but I can still pick it up and play once in a while, maybe with a skill
level of around 2 dan I guess. Look back from now, Go looks interesting, but
when I was forced to learn it at the age of 7, it was all boring and dull.

------
spacemanaki
This whole thread makes me want to start learning how to play again. I don't
think I have played more than about half a dozen games but it is by far the on
of the most compelling games I've encountered.

------
kgosser
I've tried to pick it up, have not found any clubs or anything in Milwaukee,
so I've had to play via computer. Due to that, I haven't been able to pick it
up as much as I'd like.

~~~
chops
Another Milwaukeean!

The little bit that I played was also online. I didn't (and still don't) know
anyone that played, either in person or online, so I haven't had anyone I can
just bombard with questions. Whenever I played online I just got slaughtered,
and any pleas for "what am I doing wrong" generally went unanswered.

Occasionally, I'll hit up <http://goproblems.com> and I struggle with all but
the most obvious answers.

Despite reading a book or two about the game, and the handful of games online,
it just never clicked. But I remain fascinated by the game and am on the
constant lookout for someone who actually knows how to play. It's been a while
now since I last tried to play, but I'm always down.

------
justinweiss
I just started playing casually earlier this year and I'm about 13-15k on DGS.
I really liked the players on KGS, but it's hard for me to find an hour or two
of totally uninterrupted time. DGS is so perfect for the slow pace I like to
play that I wrote an iPhone client for it: <http://dgs.uberweiss.net>

When I started playing, it was frustrating and confusing. Now, it's still
frustrating and confusing, but it's also so much fun.

------
Tarks
I play, can't even remember how I heard of it but my girlfriend and I learned
together a few months ago, I've just got another friend hooked on it too.
Having SmartGo Kifu on the iPad and the free go Client from Pandanet has made
it easier to learn.

Funny thing is, a co-worker caught me playing it, then while he was
slaughtering me in a lunchbreak another couple of guys came out of the
woodwork too ^_^

I find it very cool that there's just one piece that can be used for
everything.

------
lukas
I've been getting a little more back into go lately. Online games are hard for
me for some reason and I like to play slower than most people on kgs.

Back when I was active I was an AGA 5dan (probably 6dan in japan). If anyone
in SF wants an in-person game I'd love to play - shoot me an email at
lukas@crowdflower.com. Our office has a couple learning go players and our
janitor might be around 1 dan.

------
sz
I learned how to play in Taiwan and it's become my favorite board game.

I'm not very good though. Do you have any suggestions for improving?

~~~
thangalin
1\. Play lots of 9x9 games against a stronger opponent:

<http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html>

2\. Study tsumego (life and death) problems. By study, I mean keep replaying
the same positions until you can identify the sequence to live (or to kill)
immediately. Study problems slightly more difficult than your own rank (maybe
1 or 2 stones). Do this for 15 minutes every day for 6 months and you will be
quite strong.

<http://tsumego.tasuki.org/?page=tsumego>

<http://senseis.xmp.net/?BenjaminTeuber%2FGuideToBecomeStrong>

3\. Replay master games. Don't merely click through games on the computer. Get
a board. Get stones. Feel the stones in your hand and think about where you
would place each move. Try to discover, for yourself, why the master played
the move.

<http://www.kiseido.com/Game.htm>

4\. Study fuseki theory and master fuseki player games:

<http://senseis.xmp.net/?TakagawaKaku>

~~~
Estragon

      Do this for 15 minutes every day for 6 months and you will be quite strong.
    
      http://senseis.xmp.net/?TsumegoLounge
    

It's not at all clear from this page how you actually get to the puzzles.
(Which sound like fun.)

~~~
thangalin
Updated with more relevant links. Also, tsumego is a Google-friendly word.
(Unlike Go, which is now a programming language, too. Fortunately there is
baduk and weichi.)

~~~
Estragon
Thanks. That led me to this page:

    
    
      http://senseis.xmp.net/?ProblemsAndExercises
    

Which contains links to actual puzzles.

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philh
I'm philh on kgs, but these days I mostly play in person at my university
club. One consequence of this is that I don't really know my rank. We have our
own ladder, on which I'm currently 15.5k, but it tends to underrank people as
compared to KGS. I'm probably not above 10k.

If anyone's interested in a game, I can play most evenings, British time.

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muloka
I always thought this would be a great game to teach to under privileged youth
and the homeless.

Its also relatively easy to put together a makeshift go board. At most all one
needs is white and black paint, brushes, rocks, a piece of plywood or plastic,
and something straight to make the lines.

You could even teach them how to make their own board and pieces.

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hasenj
I've taken some interest in it and sometimes try to play against the computer,
but I'm horribly bad at it.

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ericlavigne
I just found out that Go is a popular game among Clojure programmers. This is
how the speakers at the first Clojure conference celebrated the night before
the conference.

<http://twitter.com/cemerick/status/28359615311>

------
marze
For the vast majority of games people play, there exists a computer opponent
that can beat just about anyone.

Go is an exception. Even a moderately experienced amateur can beat the best
computer opponent easily. I think this says something about the richness of
the game.

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adewale
I play as 'adewale' on KGS and I'm currently a 9 kyu. Although, as you can
see: <http://www.gokgs.com/servlet/graph/adewale-en_US.png> , my ranking tends
to fluctuate.

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realitygrill
I got to about 2kyu on KGS and was very addicted. Getting beyond this
apparently required me to seriously dedicate myself to studying, though, and I
had to deal with my normal life. So I haven't played in over a year.

I hope to start playing again sometime.

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seigenblues
Hey thangalin! I remember seeing you on KGS a few years ago. I'm. About 2-3d
on kgs and would be happy for a game.

Also, if any go players in CA are interested, next years US Go Congress will
be in Santa Barbara, 1st week in August!

~~~
thangalin
That was around my peak, when I could battle a 4d KGS player with a flame's
chance in space of winning (that is to say: slim to none).

I don't have a lot of time for real-time games. (Working, travelling, social
activities, writing, saving the world, you know how it goes.) A non-real-time
game would be ideal.

<http://apps.facebook.com/gothegame/>

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spot
I used to play a lot on NNGS and the Palo Alto Go Club in ~98 but now I just
teach. Sticking with the f2f version :)

I was into the game enough that when I had a free week in a Japan, I spent it
playing every day at a club.

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krschmidt
I sometimes hop on KGS, but I'm very rusty. Probably ~17k. Wonderful game. I
teach it to the kids in my programming class whenever we have a few moments of
free time (usually day before Thanksgiving, etc).

------
MK5
I started playing Go at 4 with dad and played a while of IGS (the Panda net
thing) and got pretty high (around 2D). But felt in love with Starcraft which
is for me, GO+Chess and in real time :p

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RBerenguel
I never went beyond 14-12 kyu. I still want to improve, but life is always
getting in the way (also, I get pretty nervous when playing and it is
discouraging). But I also love the game.

------
inimino
I play online very rarely (about 1d on IGS and KGS ranks). Lately I've started
a couple games on DGS. I'd welcome a game on DGS with anyone from Hacker News.

------
moconnor
I play (well, I have played) and agree it's an amazing, beautiful game like no
other.

I only reached around 10 kyu though; don't have the time for it these days.

------
Xurinos
Anyone know where I can play Capture Go at multiple levels? That is, single
capture, 2-capture, 3-capture, etc? 9x9 and larger boards?

~~~
raganwald
I don't know _where_ , but when you get there, I wrote an SPI HTML5/JS Goban
for iPad/Safari that supports single capture and capture five on various
boards:

<http://github.com/raganwald/wood_and_stones>

If you want other games like 2-capture or 3-capture, I can file an issue and
add the games. And nothing's stopping you from forking, making the changes,
and sending me a pull request :-)

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timdellinger
Guilty as charged: I'm a go player.

Not currently active, unless you count the occasional game against Many Faces
Of Go (igowin) on the iPad.

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jedediah
I'm jedediah on KGS, and would welcome any game, though I'm a meager ~20k, as
I've just started playing.

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cies
i play it. it's my favorite board game: i'd say it is the best example of a
well designed game :)

though i do not play it online.

my dad thought me how to play it at the age of 8. for some time i played it at
a go club, but that never really caught on. now i play with a couple of
friends or with my dad.

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matth
I was working on this for a while: yayforgo.com.

I got a new job and just couldn't focus on it. Bummer!

Anyone want the source code?

~~~
gcao
I'm very interested in it. It looks like it is a Python web application,
right? I'm a Ruby programmer and should be able to understand the code and
steal some ideas if you don't mind :-P

------
enki
there's a go club in soma. we're meeting at twitter every wednesday at 8am but
have been thinking of moving a more accessible time and location and call it
@somagoclub. anyone interested? (soma, san francisco)

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Willwhatley
9k KGS.

Same question as OP, but addressed to kyu players-?

------
epynonymous
my dad and uncle are fanaticso, send me your contact information, i'll hook
you two up.

