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Go Game Guru – Learn all about the board game Go (gogameguru.com)
171 points by dukenuke on March 17, 2016 | hide | past | favorite | 85 comments



For the English speaking Go community, GoGameGuru is without question the most reliable online resource for great commentary on the most important matches between the world's top players (and of course more recently AlphaGo vs. Lee Sedol). They also do translations of the best content from Korea's BadukTV - lessons, game commentary, famous problem sets, and more. GoGameGuru is a treasure trove, no question.

That said, GoGameGuru is just another sign of an explosion of amazing Go content, tools, and communities for an English speaking audience. There's really never been a better time to get into the game. You have Lee Hajin's (Korean 3p) YouTube channel https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTji1kQNoWIH85dB_Vxka9g where she plays games live on Tygem (one of the largest and strongest online Go communities, many top pros play there). You have online sophisticated pattern searching over hundreds of years of games http://ps.waltheri.net. You can get free online commentary on games you played https://gokibitz.com. And you can easily find an opponent online without leaving the comfort of your browser http://online-go.com.

I wrote a post in January summarizing all the great content now available as well as possible paths to deepening your understanding of the game - http://swannodette.github.io/baduk//baduk/2016/01/08/hello-b....


This is a great post. I do think it should mention OGS (online-go.com) as an alternative to KGS. Some people may really not like installing a Java app for KGS.


I'd also mention the turn-based (async) Go system, Dragon Go Server: http://www.dragongoserver.net/

Many people find the more relaxed environment useful for playing human games. You don't need to commit to a block of uninterrupted time, and you can take your time and play out ideas. There's a great Android client: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mco.prj.app.bw... and DGS plugin: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mco.prj.srv.bw...


Nice post! The one thing I think is missing is Dwyrin's YouTube videos and lectures:

https://www.youtube.com/user/dwyrin

He's all about how you can reach dan level just by being good at direction of play, even if you're not great at solving problems. Also just the fact that he grew up in America makes him a little easier to understand.


TIL David Nolen is a Go player. Thanks for the resources (new player myself) as well as your ClojureScript related work.


I just started playing Go this January. The game was fairly overwhelming at first.

The path I followed to get a decent understanding of the game (I'm about 13kyu now) was this:

1. Start by playing a few games, doesn't really matter the size of the board, or whatever, it's just for context and to get a general feel for the game. But not enough games to get dejected or fall into bad habits.

2. Read an introductory Go book. I personally first read "Go; More Than a Game" by Peter Shotwell. It explains the game from the very beginning and also has a lot of historical context which most Go books do not. My roommate had this book which was very convenient for me. An online resource that is fairly good is Sensei's Library, especially http://senseis.xmp.net/?HaengMaTutorialForBeginners. You can also find the definition and exampels of all Go terms here.

3. Play more games, try to apply things you learned from the book. Also start watching Nick Sibicky's YouTube lecture series. Just start at #1 and keep watching when you have time. I'm only on lecture ~30 but I find they have been very helpful.

4. Get a Tsumego (like chess problems, but Go problems) app or something for your phone and do a Go problem every so often. (Try to do at least 10 problems a day. Try reading it out rather than firing shots blindly. If you just brute force the solution you won't learn nearly as much as if you spend a long time just trying to read it out.)

5. At this point, you should be playing a few 19x19 games every week. Keep in mind that 9x9 is fairly different, so play it if you like it but keep in mind it is not 19x19 at all. Try to review after each game, or have your games reviewed by stronger players. There are a lot of friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable players in the chat rooms on online-go.com and the review tool is pretty cool. The site actually uses a pretty modern stack, too, using node.js and Angular, if I recall correctly... the devs hang out in chat too and are fairly open to questions)

6. At this stage, you should be somewhere around 20-15k on online-go.com. (Essentially, past the most basic novice level. You understand atari, ko, etc. You recognize some of the obvious mistakes.) Now it's time to buy a more serious Go book. I highly recommend "The Fundamentals of Go" by Toshiro Kageyama 7p and "Graded Go Problems for Beginners" (Volume 2) by Kano Yoshinori 9p. Kageyama's writing style is pretty entertaining and he stresses the fundamentals which are very important. The Go Problems book covers a lot more than life and death, it has opening, end game, etc problems, with explanations attached to all the answers.

7. Keep playing games, doing tsumego, watching youtube videos, and re-reading the books if relevant. It should be a straight and steady climb to single digit kyu-dom from here on out. At least that's my hope. :)

-----

NOTE: Do not play against Go computer programs if you can help it... they play bizarre moves that sometimes work out and sometimes are meaningless... You can learn much more from a human opponent who will help you learn the obvious mistakes by punishing you for them directly.


I've started playing Go against a computer (SmartGo iOS on a 9x9 board) but I find the hard part is determining where you're making mistakes, what is a better move, why the computer did what it did etc. For instance the computer may ignore a capture to play elsewhere and it can be hard to work out why. I learnt to play Chess when I was young so I can't make a fair comparison but it feels like Chess is much easier to self diagnose.


I took up Go about six months ago, after many false starts over the years. The secret for me was to stop playing computers and start playing humans online (I like online-go.com). Computers at lower difficulty settings make a combination of very strong moves and very weird moves, which are difficult for beginners to interpret. And the game is just a lot more fun when playing against people of similar skill level or a bit stronger, so you win about 50% of games and can understand your opponents' moves more easily.


The 12k bots on pandanet are good for learning how to make large groups live against a relatively good opponent, large group deaths are usually the most damaging thing to a beginner's results.


Large group death meaning that the opponent invades before you have created eyes among your large-looking territory?


In your large-looking territory, the territory would be the eyes.

Large group death just basically mean a large group of stones, it could either be an invasion group, an attack and run group that grows, or even the used-to-be-territory-but-now-not group


Sounds like good advice. I have noticed some of these weird moves using the hint function - at times they've caused me to lose badly so I've gone back and done something else and came out on top which made me question the reasoning behind it.



One of the most important concepts in Go is the idea of initiative and forcing moves (see "sente" and "gote"). Making an unnecessary capture is giving your opponent initiative, so it's a "gote" play. They're free to play anywhere else on the board, which is bad for you.

Sometimes a group of stones is in a position such that no matter how their owner plays there is no way they can be saved (assuming correct play from the opponent). The stones are called "dead". Instead of capturing those stones, it's better to play elsewhere and retain the initiative ("sente"). You retain control of the game and your opponent is forced to react. You're not losing anything, because you can come back and capture the stones any time. If your opponent tries to save them you know a move that will prevent it.

Recognizing stones that can't possibly escape being captured, and knowing how to stop them escaping, is the study of "life and death". The better you get at this the less likely you are to waste moves or give away the initiative.


This is the single biggest issue with introducing go to newcomers. In chess, the goal is crystal clear - capture the king. In go, the goal of having more points than your opponent is somehow very challenging to grasp in an intuitive way.

There's a common advice to lose your first 50 games as quickly as possible (http://senseis.xmp.net/?LoseYourFirst50GamesAsQuicklyAsPossi...). This will give you some basic intuition about the game. After a couple more hundred games, go becomes very beautiful.


Thanks for the advice. Though I'm planning to be really good, so I'm going to lose my first 500 games.


Plus you can generally see who's in front in Chess just by counting the value of the captured pieces. Where as I would not have been able to workout the result of the AlphaGo v Lee Sedol games just by looking at the final game board.

The beauty of the game is appealing however so I want to get better at it. I'll working on losing more then :)


Typically evaluation of a Go board runs something like

(1) Identify all the groups.

Most important are any groups larger than about 4-6 stones or groups that cannot be sacrificed for some other reason. You'll often see some straggler group which exists purely to disconnect your opponents groups keeping them weak. That one is small but important!

(2) Determine their status.

Essentially, their opponent decided it was time to kill this group and tried with all their might would the group be able to survive? You can be fuzzy about this ("there are a lot of possibilities for this group to live") or even economical ("it would take a lot of turns for B to kill W's group here, is it worth it?").

(3) Decide who "owns" every empty intersection.

Once you've identified the strong, living groups you'll see that they probably capture territory because they surround some empty intersections. These spaces can be invaded or reduced if they are too large (so that the opponent could possible attack inside and make a living group) or if they have open spaces (where an opponent could threaten to stream inside). There will also be a lot of points in the early and middle game for which nobody really owns and you can evaluate if one player merely holds greater or lesser sway over those intersections.

(4) Subtract maybe 20 points for each weak group that can't be sacrificed.

Saving groups that must be saved is an expensive operation and your opponent will probably cash in on you doing so.

(5) If it's early or mid-game consider each player's global influence.

For instance, a common trade is that one player will make a living group in the corner and take points while the other player will surround that group on the "outside" producing a large wall facing the center. This wall cannot claim to make territory since it doesn't completely control any location, but it certainly makes battles nearby tilt in the favor of the wall owner. This will translate to cash elsewhere for that player.

---

Don't try too hard at any step. Part of skilled judgement is being able to do each step accurately (and include more important factors) much in the same way that materiel balance in Chess can be hard to judge unless you know how to contextualize it.

Also note that a well-matched professional game will be decided by just 1 or 2 points. Until your judgement is very tight or the game is very near the end it can be hard to be precise enough to see that.


The general principle is that captures aren't actually worth a whole lot. Territory (area under your control) is where it's at. If a capture is a means of getting more territory, that's grand, but on it's own it's not worth much at all.

Does this help your self diagnosis? If the computer ignored a capture it's because it didn't actually lead to a lot of territory gained, whereas whatever move it played probably did.


While scoring go uses area you control + number of stones you capture right?

Somewhere I read about go it makes no sense to put stones on the area your opponent control because they will be captured. however

  wwwww
  w   w
  w b w
  w   w
  wwwww
in this case white has to put 4 stones (thus reduce area by 4) just to get 1 point. am I missing something


This is why I much prefer Chinese (and similar) rules with area scoring. In area scoring you get one point for each space you surround, and one point for each stone on the board. It's immediately obvious and simple.

In Japanese rules you lose points for playing in your own territory. The black stone in your example is dead, and a reasonable player would allow it to be removed, but there's nothing stopping them from claiming it to be alive and forcing white to play to capture it. At this point the only option is for white to dispute its life status, and to duplicate the game board and make a hypothetical sequence of plays to prove it to be dead without actually playing the moves. There's a lot of added complexity for no real benefit, because the end result is usually identical.


I still prefer Japanese counting since it takes a lot less time to count (at least for me) a full 19x19 board. The only way white loses points (relative to black) by being forced to "play it out" is if black passes -- but the AGA resolves that by requiring you to give up a pass stone as a prisoner when you pass, and if the game has ended and you have to play it out, passes aren't allowed.

The next AI challenge is to have the AI make an argument that will convince everyone to adopt the One True Most Elegant Ruleset for Go. (http://warp.povusers.org/go/RulesElegance/ is an interesting page, along with his proposal: http://warp.povusers.org/go/MyRulesProposal/)


Chinese counting is just as fast once you're used to it. Remember that you only need to count one player under Chinese rules. And the AGA rules are a nice hack to Japanese rules to make them always give the same result as Chinese rules and avoid trolling/unreasonable plays, but it's still more complicated to explain to beginners than Chinese rules.


Yes, I always teach novices with area scoring, because all of the "if I played it out, I'd kill you, but I don't have to actually play it out" stuff is incredibly confusing to someone learning the rules for the first time. It's much nicer to have no penalty (other than opportunity cost) for playing these sequences out.

The AGA system of pass stones, bringing area and territory scoring into alignment, is very nice, but I think it's still a bit abstract for someone who's just starting out.


But in practice there usually ends up being no difference in score under either ruleset, or by at most 1 point difference.


A computer will correctly score that b as a dead stone, since it can't possibly make life, and white can kill it. That insurmountable threat makes the territory white's.

If a human tries to argue that b is alive, then either (a) that human is a novice, you can teach them, or (b) that human is a poor sport, and you shouldn't play with them.

Japanese counting is like Chinese counting, but assumes your opponent is not a jerk without explicitly handling cases when that's not true.


If a group is dead, it will be automatically captured at the end of the game.

So, in this case, the black stone is auto-captured, and you get the territory within as well.

So, yes, playing white stones to capture is actually detrimental to yourself. But also imagine if black keeps playing. They would be giving away free captures since black can never create eyes. And once the space is almost filled white can play 1 stone to capture all of the black stones.

Edit: Another way to imagine it is if neither player could pass. While yes White would lose territory as it played stones, it would be compensated by Black playing stones that will be captured in the end. Thus it becomes a wash, and thus why dead groups are auto-captured.


That thinking does help, I did read that on one of the sites as well but in some cases the capture appears to mean the loss of territory itself in addition to the actual pieces and it's hard to weigh up the value of each territory.


Another reason the computer might ignore a direct capture is because the stones are already "dead", it doesn't need to waste a move to actually capture them unless you futilely try to save them. Solving tsumego might help you see those cases better when it's not as simple a case of leaving your stones in atari. But yeah, even if you can "save" them next move it might still ignore the capture if there's a bigger (in terms of gaining / securing territory) move on the board, especially if your save actually isn't making them alive yet.

I think scoring and score estimating is one of the hardest things to understand (for full games I still often use a $5 android app where I just upload a picture of the board game, help it convert to an SGF, and then it auto-scores it, though sometimes it's faster to just count by hand), especially since there's multiple ways of doing it. With simple territory scoring when the game ends the dead stones that haven't actually been captured yet still get removed and added to the prisoners pile and the prisoners fill in your other territory so it might feel extra painful to lose stones... With area/stone scoring you still remove the dead stones but prisoners don't (directly) matter for the score, since you're just counting stones on the board plus uncontested area. But if a game was X moves with black having X/2 stones but white only having (X/2 - 10) stones on the board, clearly (assuming X is even and no passes, or if passes then giving up pass stones) 10 white stones were captured at some point, so there's already that relative difference in score before counting anything else. With some qualifications, the results (and the relative scores themselves) from each counting system will be the same. Thinking more about your relative score instead of giving each player actual numbers might help; I feel slightly better if I lost by 10 than if I had a negative score, say -5 to 5...


As others have said, there's no substitute for playing against human beings.

When you've played a few proper games, I recommend joining a teaching ladder. Your games will be reviewed by stronger players. In exchange, you are expected to review the games of weaker players. Teaching can be just as valuable as learning, as it forces you to clarify concepts in your mind in order to explain them. Even if you're a high-kyu player, you can teach a beginner the basics.

https://gtl.xmp.net/ http://senseis.xmp.net/?KGSTeachingLadder


Clearly the next goal for AI is a program that can teach Go better than human teachers.


that's essentially a pyramid system ...


Pyramid systems involve exponential (or at least superlinear) growth which was not implied by the parent post.


Why was the top player there all along? In a financial "pyramid scheme" it is because money streams to the top. In a teaching ladder, what malicious incentive does the person at the top have to where leaving would cause the whole system to collapse? Most likely, the other players at the top would be happy to take on the role as top player in the league and would continue to self-teach to maintain their place.


Exactly. A teaching ladder is simply a cooperative effort to share skills. No money changes hands and there is no benefit to being at the top of the ladder other than kudos.


was just kidding ... LOL


I think people on Hacker News have a good sense of humor. However, with no indication of sarcasm, attempts at humor can instead make you look foolish. Try adding a winky-face next time, dummy ;-)


well, they promise you to be teached - but (and here's the catch) you have to teach yourself - but then at some point the upmost teacher leaves with his knowledge and the whooooole ladder starts to crash - so obvious


A teaching ladder is a linear system, not a pyramid. I get a lesson, I give a lesson, one for one. Reciprocity is used purely to prevent the free rider problem. Participants freely barter their expertise rather than paying for lessons. This is a perfectly stable arrangement - the ladder in the first link has been running continuously since 1994.

The person at the top of the ladder is essentially performing a public service, because they don't get the benefit of learning from a more experienced player. If they leave then the ladder doesn't collapse, the second strongest player simply becomes the leader.

Ladders are commonly used as a competition format in many sports. They provide an excellent way of giving players a challenging but enjoyable game. Teaching ladders are simply an elaboration on this format.


>For instance the computer may ignore a capture to play elsewhere and it can be hard to work out why.

I think the biggest insight I had about Go when I was learning to play it is that the game commences on the entire board at once. At the beginning I was over-concentrating on a single "active" region. In reality, abandoning some "battle" and adding stones to an "unrelated" region is a perfectly sensible strategy as long as you think it will give you territory in the long run.


I've had the same experience. It's easy to get drawn into petty skirmishes and ignore the larger play for territory.

A good rule of thumb = don't needlessly increase the margin of your victory for any particular part of the board


Something that Michael Redmond 9P said a few times during the AlphaGo match was about how there comes a point in any sequence where the next move is of dramatically lower value than the previous.


I've had a similar problem. I would like to develop an intuition for the game by exploring different variations, "if I do this, the opponent does this, but if I do this, the opponent does this instead", but last I looked I couldn't find a client with a good interface for exploring the game tree that way with a computer opponent.

I know playing against humans is better, but a computer opponent has the patience to watch me try hundreds of moves that they know are dumb, or let me cheat to test "what if" scenarios.

A variation explorer with a "What would GNU Go do?" button feels like it would be good for this.

One thing that has helped me is Tsumego problems, which cover local life-and-death situations. They usually include responses by the opponent to help you see why a move is bad.


My trouble with tsumego:

I can sit down and maybe solve a tsumego problem, OK. Sometimes I guess a bit (MCTS!) instead of working out the whole tree, developing that intuition.

But tsumego are labelled with difficulty and that they are winnable.

But when I play a game, how do I know how if a certain local position is winnable, and worth spending the minute(s) to find how to win it?


There are two big purposes for Tsumego, one is to train your reading ability, the other is to train your intuition and knowledge.

For the former, you need to read out ALL variations, and not just one branch. For the latter, and your question, it's just simply a matter of solving lots and lots of tsumegos. In real game, people missed life and deaths situation all the time :-).


You might do better with problems that ask you to determine the status (alive/dead/seki/killable/ko/etc) of a group of stones.


There are a few (free) teaching ladders out there. The basic idea is that you have your games reviewed by players a few stones stronger than you, e.g. you are ranked around 10k and the reviewer 4k. Reviewers are strong enough to spot the biggest weaknesses in your play, so that you can improve quickly.

When I used the ladder, 15 years ago, their problem was that they had too many reviewers and too few students, so it was nice as a student :) You should give it a try.

http://gtl.xmp.net/ http://senseis.xmp.net/?TeachingLadder


See if you can find someone to play a simple Capture Game with you on the 9x9. That is, the goal of each player is to capture say 3 of the other person's stones, then the game ends. This will help with some basic things like making sure you're keeping track of liberties, seeing how you can form two eyes (a stepping stone to forming territory) and be uncapturable, seeing which moves require a response to save a stone/group of stones, and seeing when an attempt to save a stone would be pointless (e.g. you're in a ladder).


I've had the same issue. It would be helpful to have some kind of 'ranking' for a move after it's been played so you know if you've immediately made a mistake. Often after playing a losing game I'll undo moves and try some variations, but I don't know how far to go back. Was it my 50th move that was weak, or the 10th one... I know a moves strength isn't immediately obvious (as was apparent in the alphago games) so it's strength could be adjusted as the game progresses.


Blunders are fairly easy to notice in-game or afterward in review, but yeah it can be frustrating when you don't feel like you made a big mistake but still lost by a lot. If you have a better player look it over though they'll at least find a bad / inefficient move pretty much every few moves that "only" loses you maybe 3-5 points but the accumulation at the end is pretty big. Personally I like GnuGo for doing some post-game move analyses (I use the GoGui client) but I think I'd fare much better having a good player review or do a teaching game... Still, it's kind of fun to look at its suggested Top Moves, or try letting it finish a game (Final Score -- I think its Estimate Score is pretty terrible, though AlphaGo's would be nice to have on hand...) with itself after certain points to see if any are decisive for it. Another fun thing I did recently with a wild full game was have GnuGo annotate every move with the top moves it would have picked along with marking dead or critical groups. (The command is: `gnugo --level 15 --output-flags dv --replay both -l input-game.sgf -o annotated-output-game.sgf`)

What I really want is a kibitzing clock when playing other people: http://www.emptytriangle.com/archive/show/8


I am finding doing Go puzzles help here. I have an android app, I'm sure there are iOS equivalents. The puzzles only seem to tell you when you have made a wrong move and not why, but after spending some time thinking about it it usually comes clear.


There are a set of forums where you can get reviews from stronger players at lifein19x19.com/forum/. Downthread, people have mentioned the go teaching ladder, which is a good site, but you may get faster feedback on the forums.


Sounds like the hard part was the whole game ;)


The biggest most canonical English resource is http://senseis.xmp.net. You can get lost there for days.


I, and I suspect a lot of other people, was introduced to Go by the tv show Hikaru No Go.

> While exploring his grandfather's shed, Hikaru stumbles across a Go board haunted by the spirit of Fujiwara-no-Sai, a Go player from the Heian era. Sai wishes to play Go again, having not been able to since the late Edo period, when his ghost appeared to Honinbo Shusaku, a top Go player of that period. Sai's greatest desire is to attain the Kami no Itte (神の一手?, "Divine Move") – a perfect move. Because Hikaru is apparently the only person who can perceive him, Sai inhabits a part of Hikaru's mind as a separate personality, coexisting, although not always comfortably, with the young boy.

> Urged by Sai, Hikaru begins playing Go despite an initial lack of interest in the game. He begins by simply executing the moves Sai dictates to him, but Sai tells him to try to understand each move.

It's a fun series, especially if you have a fast-forward button and don't have to fumble around with discs


What would you ever fast forward besides the intro/"last time on.." and the outro? ;)

I would add a recommendation to watch the Japanese dub. I accidentally stumbled upon the English dub on Youtube recently, I didn't even know there was one, it was terrible...


> What would you ever fast forward besides the intro/"last time on.." and the outro?

5 minute long freeze-frame shots where the camera slowly pans over shocked faces having a massive emotional reaction to every single clever move.

Just like I'd fast forward Dragon Ball Z every time Goku needs to use 3 episodes of grunting to charge up an energy ball attack.


That's why reading the manga is almost always the superior experience compared to watching the anime adaptation.

The adaptations usually insert so much unnecessary filler because they'd otherwise catch up to the latest manga chapter much more quickly. Your typical half-hour episode usually covers 2-3 chapters' worth of material. Without the filler, a year's worth of manga might be covered in half a season of anime.

Regarding HnG specifically, reading the manga has the additional advantages of not bothering with intros/outros/spoilery-previews and allowing you to avoid messing with pause buttons to get a better view of game boards. The art is also absolutely gorgeous, especially in the latter half of the series.


Here is another list of useful go resources : https://forums.online-go.com/t/free-resources-for-beginners/...

Another useful site which has interactive tutorials : https://online-go.com/learn-to-play-go

https://online-go.com is also good for playing games online.


The best introduction to the game that I've ever found is "The Interactive Way to Go"

http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/


Seconded. The only downside is that it's using Flash.


Yeah, it would be awesome if someone would modernize it. Or do something like Chesscademy for Go.


Learning:

- I personally like this guide: http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/

- If you use Windows or Mac, there's a very good software called SmartGo. On Linux you might want to try "Kigo", from KDE.

- Eidogo.com and Josekipedia.com are good for learning joseki.

- For Android there's a really good app for exercises called "Magic Baduk Go".

Some mini review of different servers:

- online-go.com (OGS) is excellent, but is very new and not as active as other servers. Still recommended.

- KGS if you are western is the thing. There are usually bots that are 24 kyu that you can play against if you are new to the game.

- IGS might be good as well.

- Tygem and WBaduk are very hostile to new players because of the high number of sandbaggers (dans that pretend to be 18 kyu). You can get it running on Windows or Wine.

Books:

- "In the beginning", "38 basic joseki" and "attack and defense" are probably the best books for starting on go. SmartGo has them, and this will save you the effort of reading complex diagrams. Instead you can have interactive embedded go boards.

Equipment and playing offline:

- If you don't want to commit to buy equipment, drop by a go club and try the game. Usually people there are very friendly to newcomers.

- If you just want to commit to the real thing you can look for go boards and stones on Amazon. My personal favourite stones are the "Yangstone go stones", korean made durable glass stones. Other stones like Yunzi can be really fragile and shatter. Stones are the most important thing to start.

- You can start off a printable 9x9 board for practicing, then play on 13x13 then 19x19. Starting directly on 19x19 is a bit difficult.

Watching professional go games:

- You can subscribe to Baduk TV, or watch their Youtube channel for free: https://www.youtube.com/user/onbaduktv

- You can see latest game records (kifu) uploaded to gokifu.com

Lessons:

- Some people on KGS offer lessons. While this can be a bit expensive and they might be hard to find, it's a possibility. I did this for a couple of years and I went from 20 kyu to around 5 kyu.


If you're shopping for a Go set, I would recommend looking at http://www.thegamesupply.com/go-game-sets/

There are a few medium quality boards on there. There is a $70 set with free shipping that includes:

• 1 full size (17"x18") wooden board with wooden feet

• 320 Bi-convex glass stones with plastic containers


While we're here, does anyone know a good Go app for Android? A lot of them look like spyware, judging by permissions.



I use "Go Free." It has permissions to USB storage and network access. The unpaid version allows a 13x13 board (19x19 requires upgrading). It has 10 levels of difficulty, of which I can only beat up to level 3. The ads are a little annoying, but no worse than any other free games I have for android:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=uk.co.aifactor...


They recently upgraded their engine to a stronger one, so are you still at 3? Also the full app is available for free on Amazon Underground, I use that for playing 19x19 games.

The big lacking feature of the app for me is that it doesn't let you save your game as an SGF. At least https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=mco.prj.app.bw... lets you do that.


I just got the notice about the upgrade. I'm probably going to do worse at 3 now since my wins there were tenuous. Go has been an easy game for me to learn, but a very difficult game for me to get any good at. I just don't know how to think about it the way I think about chess.


Yeah, I haven't upgraded my copy from Amazon since I'm still working on beating it at level 5. Still pretty weak. I've gone through the first two Janice Kim books which I think made me stronger, but I still don't handle fights very well. Finally starting to take tsumego practice more seriously, so I'm cautiously optimistic about a noticeable skill bump over the next couple months. I think my prior Chess experience helps with raw reading ability (and even just the concept of reading) but I read way too optimistically in Go, and just don't read enough in longer 19x19 games.


I use Godroid.

It's free and utilizes a version of GNU Go to play as computer AI. Also supports local multiplayer. Doesn't support network. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.agrothe.go&...


This YouTube channel has very useful and informative content. A caveat: the presenter there has a very thick Chinese accent. I personally have no problem with it but some people have commented that they can't understand what he's saying.

https://www.youtube.com/user/gocommentary/videos

This is one of the best game commentaries in my opinion. It has subtitles to help with the accent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3O-lwNzN0G0


It's been a joy to watch all of the excitement around Lee Sedol and AlphaGo's incredible machine performance translate into increasing interest in Go, rather than a disappointed turn away from another domain that we seem to be preempted from. Maybe this speaks to something deeply encouraging about the definition of actual human intelligence.

It's sure makes me feel better about all the time I've spent playing Go during the workday these past few weeks, anyway.


Slightly off topic perhaps, but I've been looking to buy a Go game. Dutch sites don't seem to have it for a reasonable price; this site sells it for $9.99 but with $18 shipping. Any Europeans here who can tell me how to get it to either a German, Belgian or Dutch address for about €20 or less?


The cheapest set of playable quality I've found is from GoGameGuru. It includes a wooden board and plastic stones and bowls. It costs €35 shipped to the Netherlands.

https://shop.gogameguru.com/newbie-go-game-set/

I have one of these folding magnetic sets. It's a few centimetres smaller than a standard board, but is perfectly usable and very convenient for study or casual games in cafes. It costs €22 shipped, but you'll have to wait a few weeks as it's sent direct from China.

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/Free-shipping-large-magnetic-...


Hebsacker Verlag has options for every budget. Shipping still adds a bit, though:

http://www.hebsacker-verlag.de/shop.php

http://www.hebsacker-verlag.de/shipping.php


There are many go clubs in the Netherlands. Find one, go and play with people! While you are at it, you can ask them about buying a go board and will probably be able to buy one without having to pay for shipping at all.


If I remember correctly, my girlfriend looked for one near south Limburg but the closest one was Utrecht.. I know there is an index for chess clubs, do you know of one for go clubs?


The Nederlandse Go Bond has a list of affiliated clubs. If you speak French or German, I might also suggest looking for clubs across the border.

https://www.gobond.nl/verenigingen http://www.eurogofed.org/members/


https://gobond.nl/verenigingen

Surprisingly, south Limburg doesn't seem to be included.


There are options that would fit your budget on the german amazon site. I really recommend investing a little more (€30-40) and get something nicer. I've had my go board and stones for 20+ years now (not that I get to play much but it's still great to play a round from time to time). This is something that you'll hold on to for quite a while.


IMO it'd be better to draw a board on a piece of wood and use black and white glass gems, rather than buying a very low-end set. Very cheap sets have stones that are just too small. Probably the best beginner set would be a set of full-size glass or melamine stones and a roll-up vinyl board.


have you tried a Chinatown gift shop? The kind of place that sells baoding balls, incense and kitschy porcelain?


"Despite recent advances, computer programs are still a long way off being able to compete with the top human players." They might want to update this ;)


What's the point? The computers can already beat everyone. :-P




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