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

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

His invasion is still on the go:

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

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

The move sequence on the real game was this one:

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

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

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

General interface:

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

In-Game and Graphics

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

Go Servers:

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

Conclusion

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

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

After a short while, he accepted my request and so we went on playing. We went on playing and I was shown a couple of tesujis I hadn't realised. In the end, my opponent made a invasion in a 4x3 corner, killed my group and shortened my score by a bunch of points. We held a nice conversation about the life-and-death situation of some groups and the whole game. A couple of minutes later, my opponent confessed he had been impressed by my petition and thus, he happily accepted.

I regard that game as the most didactic one in the whole month.

Mental note: Noone is polite, if you are polite, people are more willing to teach you.

As easy as it seems, very few people are following this rule. Though KGS still retains a friendly atmosphere, usually only 5 words take place during the games: hi, gg (stansds for good game), good luck, thx  and bye; going somewhat deeper within the game may come back as a nice reward.

As you can see, white threatens to make an eye around O4 and around T5. Actually we both thought that white was going to die and so it did during the real game.

W1 tries to move the vital point,  B2 plays in the new vital point, W3 makes an atari at the two black stones, threatening to make an eye at O4. Unfortunatelly, I thought I could play some sort of eye stealing tesuji by playing at Q3 after white plays Q2; having realised it was impossible I had to retreat myself and play at Q1, which happened to be sente and allowed me to play T3, thus removing the eyespace.

Afterwards, during the review, we realised there was a path which would have led white to a secured life... Can you find it?

In fact, it's easier that it seems... so I'll upload the sequence and some variations on the next post

There are a few interesting variations on the fuseki and the explanation of some unexpected moves by both players.

Here you have the link to the original post: Link to Godiscussions.com

Wouldn't it be great to have more of these videos??

The resulting invasion was something rather spectacular, with a big white dragon trapped between a couple of black groups as seen in the image above. But, all of a sudden, white found a tesuji with unforeseen consequences. Can you find the first move?

Now the game turned into an all-in-all game, whoever won this capturing race would win the game. Let's take a look at the board after having placed the appropiate stones:

The next move by black was S1, followed by W P1, B deffenses atari, W P11 in order to reduce black's liberties, Black S3 was very polemichal and white deffended the atari and plays the vital point at T2. As you can see by the sequence, white started reducing some of the liberties of black and the latter only has 2 liberties remaining against 4 for white.

Is there any possible sequence which would have given the victory to black?

If you wanto know the answer and watch the whole game, check the "continue reading"

A few months ago, David Fotland released the 12th edition of "Many Faces of Go". Following the patterns of its predecesors, MFoG most important changes remain within its engine.

According to its author, MFoG is supposed to be 5 stones stronger than the 11th version and, in year 2008, he proved to be the best engine by winning the Go tournament in the 13th Computer Olympiad (see Game results). Currently it's supposed to implement some Monte Carlo analysis over the traditional knowledge, so as to make it much more powerful.

If you visit its homepage, you'll see this list of the major new features of this version:

I've just been playing with the new 1.02 version of Universal 3D Chess and having fun with a couple of new features. Acutally, they might not be the most useful features in the net, but the video export may be welcomed for viewing games when the platform doesn't allow SGF files (i.e. some portable devices).

Massive rendering allows you to activate at once lots and lots of games on your screen. The first attempt I did, loading 100 games at once was quite funny, but then I overclocked the graphic card just to find out that 420 games loaded at the same time is too much for my computer. Anyway, here you have the picture of the 420 games:

And, on the next video you can watch a sample made with the new "video export" feature.

The video above has a 720x480 resolution with 25 images per second and lasts for 45 seconds. The total file size compressed with Xvid with 80% rate is 5,41 MB.

Here are the specifications of my laptop, so that you get an idea of how this might look like on yours:
-Dual Core T9100 (2,5Ghz, 6Mb Cache L2).
-4 Gigs DDR2.
-Nvidia 8600GT overclocked to 8700GT.
Obviously, the graphics card is the slowest part of the whole, but it still gives good results when it comes to Go graphics

Indeed, any Quad Core with a couple of 9800 GTX working on SLI may easily reach the 500 games with a decent frame-per-second average. I'll be waiting for your images.

The new address will be handled by FeedBurner:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/alejostenuki

During the last months, the ration feeds/visits from the blog is worrying me more and more, since everyone seems to enjoy more the feeds rather than the blog itself. Though Planetgo.org is a good feed aggregator, its content cannot be filtered at all, so it ends up showing lots of messages, limages and videos as well as way too many sources of feeds which can't be disabled. As today, its mainpage occupies 4 MB and loads exactly 111 images.

A couple of days ago I received the new version of U3DC. According to the developer (and I agree on most of them), these are the improvements:

- Add a title bar to the main 3D view with short cut to functions (Next/Prev games, Full screen, Edit game info ...)
- New file format decoding, now able to load image in jpg, png, tga,gif, tiff, bmp, pict, psd, ps ...
- Drag feature to move the menu with your mouse if the screen is notbig enought
- Interface is more easy to use and more reactive
- New dialog box when quitting the program
- New game list style
- Borders between games
- Add board tag
- Game informations editing tool
- Conversion of an image to a game (GO) works not so badly now (but still experimental)
- Bug corrections in SGF file format

What stroke me the most when I first opened the version is the feeling of the whole application itself. It actually looks like a finished project, where the first version had some bugs to be fixed, now they are mostly solved. The navigation bar, though not necessary, looks quite cool and might be useful when working with massive amounts of games. The user interface and style have been improved a lot and it gives the sensation of a much nicer application (while the essence is exactly the same).

Here you have a screenshots of how it looks like (keep in mind that I've loaded a quite heavy image so that you get the final real quality):

Another feature which has been improved a lot is the "image to sgf" tool. Now it can actually convert an image to a sgf file so that you can play with it in U3DC. The only requisites are related to the amount and contrast of the colours you should use.

As you can see on the left, white and black stones must have plain colours while the board should remain in painful contrast with the other colours. Darker colours such as brown and red, will lead the program to convert it into black stones, thus giving a wrong result.

The result of the conversion of this image can be seen here:

I think further development in this line would be great, following the path left by Image2Sgf, so that it could automatically load the image from a camera into this wonderful 3D board.

By the way... have you ever wondered how to picture your girlfriend in a go board??? Playing with the some of the pictures of your collection is just... hilarious...

Yesterday Google launched a beta version of his new browser: Chrome. 

On one hand, first independent analysis show that this application uses less resources than Firefox and Internet Explorer. It introduces some good features, as the internal task monitor... On the other hand, as it's a beta version, there are already 3 security bugs described and you'll need to upgrade to java 6.10 version if you want to use any java tool on this browser. KGS' homepage appears to be somewhat unformatted and the java applet doesn't load. I've tried a few other applications (not java based) such as EidoGo and they work perfectly well.

Unfortunatelly, there is only the windows XP version available, MAC and Linux versions are supposed to be released on the forecoming weeks. You may be surprised by the news if you already know that Google is the main sponsor of Firefox, but is is all logical if we take into account google's plans... By the way, if you are used to Firefox's keyboard shortcuts, I'm glad to tell you that they are exactly the same in Chrome.

The more I'm using unix systems, the more homesick I'm of windows. It is very secure and has lots of advantages when compared to Microsoft's operative system, but the lack of powerful go software for Unix as well as good drivers for 3D cards are two of the major drawbacks.

Today I've been playing with some programs and Wine (Wine Is Not an Emulator) trying to get them working.

Here you have the results, ordered from worst perfomance to best.

Worst:

Good:

Other newer programs such as Universal 3D chess... show problems mostly related with the 3D card drivers. On the specific case of U3DC, the drop-down menus are disabled and the variation tree doesn't work, once you click on the variation tree, the program breaks down. On the other hand, it is a very good piece of software for making demostrations and so on.

If you want to get more information on how to load these programs as well as screenshots and a nice trick for loading them if you have a windows partition, click on the continue reading article

On the 20th of June I started a new poll in order to know the level of the players who usually visits this blog.

Back from holidays I checked the results and the highest mark had already gone over 100 results, so it is time to extract some conclusions from the poll. The ones who already answered the question already know it, but for the ones who didn't, the categories where separated in the following way:

As you can see the lower categories have been truncated into more parts as the website is intended to be focused for these users while it may be of limited interest for dan players.

The results are shown in the next two graphics:

As you can see, most of the audience is ranked over 15k, being the most common level between 10k and 15k, closely followed by the weak single-digit kyu players (like me). Generally speaking, over 50% of the visitors have a level among 15k and 1k, which is not very surprising as it is the most common population. However, there are quite a few dan players who visit this blog, even more than complete beginners.

It would be nice to know the statistics for every single entry, as I think differences would be much more relevant, while videoreviews would be interesting for certain levels, my own reviews would be for others.

Currently you can only watch it through youtube or download this version with a 1036x676 resolution HERE (encoded with Xvid).

The final public realease is already available at the project's homepage: VoilaMonsieur