Thursday June 18, 2020
Candidates in the Eastern region are Justin Teng and Stephanie Yin. The contest for the At-Large seat is between Darrell Ashworth, Ted Terpstra, and Varma Ashish. Sole candidates for the central and western regions are Lisa Scott and Christian Saenz respectively. Look for your email ballots with instructions for online voting in early July.
Thursday June 18, 2020
With no US Open tournament on which to base eligibility, the AGA will hold an online qualifier to select one representative to the 15th Korea Prime Minister’s Cup, which will be held online this year (Tygem) throughout August. Any AGA amateur member who is a US Citizen and rated 6d+ may participate. Please respond to tournaments@usgo.org no later than Wednesday, June 24 to participate in the event.
Thursday June 18, 2020
The San Diego Go Club has been barred from its coffee house where it has met once a week on Tuesdays, from 7-11 p.m., for more than 25-years due to the Coronavirus, but the go players still compete. Local and more afield go players play on KGS on Tuesdays and simultaneously talk and see each other on the Discord app. The average online attendance is actually more than was showing up at the coffee house.
The Ninth Annual San Diego Go Championship was supposed to occur earlier this year, but when face-to-face competition was impossible, the club decided to have a free 5-round tournament online on KGS, in the San Diego Go Club room. Competition started three-weeks ago by 24-players (7-dan to 22-kyu) – more than half of whom are youth.. They will play one game a week for four weeks. The last round will be face-to-face whenever that is possible. There are no cash prizes, but the winner of the Open will have his name engraved on the club’s permanent plaque and win a trophy. Previous winners include Mark Lee (10-dan), Ari Saito (7-dan), Leran Zou (7-dan) and Yi Wang (6-dan).
After 3-rounds, Yixian Zhou 6d is the only undefeated player. In the Handicap section, four players remain undefeated: Anna Zhou 16k, Angelina Zhao 8k, Michael Sanders 7k, and Arunas Rudvalis 6k.
The San Diego Go Club has petitioned the AGA Board to allow this online competition to have its games AGA rated.The AGA Board is still deciding, but players are happy to have some meaningful competition none-the-less.
The 3rd annual California State Go Championship is still on the SDGC’s schedule, for the Saturday and Sunday after Thanksgiving. If face-to-face playing is not possible by then, the tournament will be held online, so that there will be a 2020 California Go Champion as well as an U16 girl and an U16 boy Champion. Everyone can compete, but only California residents can win the titles.
-report by Ted Terpstra
Wednesday June 17, 2020
The American Go Association shares the communal outrage at the inequality and injustice suffered by so many minority groups, and particularly by Black, Indigenous, and People of Color. Racism and racial inequality are anathema to the inclusive mission of our organization. The American Go Association stands behind its mission to foster inter-cultural and international goodwill through Go-related activities. Current events have prompted us to consider how we can be more conscious of the different experiences that shape our members’ lives, and reminded us of our priority to listen and learn from each other, and to welcome all into our community.
While we are a diverse community in many ways, we recognize that we have far more work to do to make our community equally welcoming to everyone. The experiences of people of color matter deeply to us, and we welcome any feedback so that we can learn how we can do better. The creation of the AGA Code of Conduct between 2015 and 2018 was catalyzed by the experiences that members shared with us, and we want the structure that it created to be a forum where experiences can continue to be shared in a way that helps us grow and become better as an organization. However, we realize we cannot place this burden on people of color alone. We ask every member of our community for help in becoming more aware of and addressing inequalities and injustices that exist in our community. You can contact the Code of Conduct Committee at any time at CodeofConduct@usgo.org or 240-513-7825.
We understand that words are not enough. The AGA board will take up issues of diversity and inclusion at it’s upcoming June 28 meeting, where concrete actions can be initiated to improve our organization in this regard. I am happy to present your ideas to the board as Coordinator for Diversity and Inclusion (email lisa.scott@usgo.org), or you can submit suggestions through the Code of Conduct Committee as described above. As a member you can listen into the meeting and observe the development of these initiatives in real time. You can also see a summary of the meeting in the posted minutes, available at https://www.usgo.org/board-minutes, and in the EJournal. To join the June 28 board meeting, please email lisa.scott@usgo.org for call-in information.
Tuesday June 16, 2020
In the regularly scheduled May 2020 meeting of the AGA Board of Directors, the board discussed the continued impact of COVID-19 on the go community, including forthcoming recommendations to continue to minimize or adjust in person go play given COVID-19 related health concerns and re-evaluation of the possibility of rating certain online games. They also approved the 2021FY budget, discussed virtual activities that could be offered as a “mini-congress,” and reviewed a proposal for a go map application. You can find the minutes of that meeting here.
You can find the minutes of the April special meeting (convened to decide whether or not to cancel the 2020 US Go congress) here. The summary of that meeting was previously published and can be found here.
The AGA Board has added an additional meeting on June 28, 2020. The topics of discussion include the annual report, online events for early August, rank certificate program, ratings, AGA privacy policy, conflict of interest policy, and long-term goals and priorities. For more information, you can find the detailed agenda here.
Are you an AGA member interested in listening in to the meeting? Please contact the Chairperson at lisa.scott@usgo.org for call-in information.
Are you interested in commenting on past board meeting minutes? You can submit your comments here, and they’ll be available to the entire board and relevant officers. Past minutes are available here.
Sunday June 14, 2020
Nominations are coming to a close June 15th and the race in the Eastern region is heating up. Three candidates are running including professional Stephanie Yin, incumbent Gurujeet Khalsa and top player Justin Teng. The contest for the At-Large seat is also active with Darrell Ashworth, incumbent Ted Terpstra and Varma Ashish running, Things are a bit quieter elsewhere with incumbents Lisa Scott in the central region and Christopher Saenz in the west running unopposed. All chapters should have received a preliminary voting rights count through the AGA chapters mailing list. Please check your membership and chapter status for recent expirations. Questions and queries should be sent to elections@usgo.org.
-report by Arnold Eudell
Friday June 12, 2020
American and Canadian women players 5D and stronger are invited to submit their names by June 19 for a chance to represent North America in the third Wu Qingyuan Cup. In light of the global COVID-19 situation, the event will take place on-line. Dates have yet to be determined, but likely sometime in July or August. North America and Europe have each been invited to send a team of four players, pro or amateur, to the event. The standard AGA and CGA eligibility rules will apply. The tournament will continue with semifinals for the top finishers. Please submit to tournaments@usgo.org with questions or entry.
Wednesday June 10, 2020
After a successful first month, the New York Go Honor Society team is ready to announce the New York Go League’s second month of competition. “The league has been operating at a participant count of over 80 players and we hope that more will be inclined to join,” says Patrick Zhao, VP of NYGHS. “Registration for the league is and will continue to be completely free for the foreseeable future.” If you are able to commit to two games per week and would like to participate, register here. “We are also proud to announce that although we cannot prize extensively, we will be awarding the top player in every division 50% off NYIG trial classes,” continued Zhao. “Despite it being a relatively small prize, we believe that it corresponds with our motivation of creating this league with the intention of giving people a chance to play competitively and develop their skills in the game.”
Saturday June 6, 2020
“There’s something magical about the game of go,” writes Branton DeMoss in a recent blog post. “For thousands of years, it has captured the imagination of those who want to learn what it is to learn, to think about what thinking means. With the recent advent of strong, open source go AI that can beat top professionals, it’s worth tracing the history of the game, why it remained so difficult to beat humans for so long, and what the future of go may hold.”
DeMoss explores the evolution of computer go, and then discusses how AlphaGo differs from the open source Katago. “KataGo attempts to predict a greater number of game outcomes than just value,’ says DeMoss, “in particular, KataGo also predicts final territory control, final score difference, and from each board state the opponent’s next move. As a result of these improvements, KataGo massively outperforms Leela Zero and Facebook’s ELF bot in learning efficiency. KataGo achieves a factor of fifty improvement in training efficiency vs. ELF”.
The creator of KataGo, David J. Wu, answers some of DeMoss’s questions at the end of the article. “I think the AlphaZero-style training loop using MCTS (Monte Carlo Tree Search) is not the last word on [things like] this,” says Wu. “Blind spots are just the most visible of the flaws, but there are some technical and theoretical details you can dig into that start to make it clear that there are some practical problems with how exploration and move discovery work in this loop, some basic theoretical flaws involving mismatches between the neural net’s training distribution and usage, and also some fundamental ‘missing’ capabilities in current bots in terms of using search effectively.” The full blog post can be read here. -Story by Paul Barchilon. image from Accelerating Self-Play Learning in Go, by David J. Wu.
Redmond launches new AlphaGo video commentary series
Monday June 8, 2020
In the first days of 2017, rumors started to ricochet around the online go community. A mysterious online player had been making huge waves by defeating dozens of top professionals on go sites in Asia in recent days. “Master” first appeared on December 29, 2016, registering from Korea. Achieving 30 consecutive wins against many former and current world go champions, Master defeated Park Junghwan four times and Ke Jie twice. After that, Master appeared on a different go site and logged another 30 consecutive wins. That made it 60 games in a row with no losses. Was AlphaGo the Master?
Michael Redmond had been on holiday when the games were being played but word had of course spread swiftly through the professional community about the mysterious online player racking up win after win. “That kind of record was simply mindblowing,” he says, “and even before I got the game files off the internet it was clear that something new was happening. Anyone – or anything – that could win 60 straight games could probably give a 2-stone handicap, and these were top professionals who were losing to a player no-one had ever heard of.” The 60 Master games were not only evidence that AlphaGo had attained a whole new level of play, but an incredibly rich “treasure trove for professionals,” says Redmond.
Working again with American Go E-Journal Managing Editor Chris Garlock, Redmond is launching a new series of videos in which he’ll focus on the key points of each of the 60 Master games in brief videos, most of which will be 15 minutes or less. The commentaries will also be the basis for Volume 2 of AlphaGo to Zero: The Complete Games, “as well as a chance to introduce viewers to the professional go players who tackled Master,” notes Garlock.
The first video will be released on Tuesday, June 9 on Redmond’s YouTube channel and the series will be linked on the AGA’s YouTube channel as well. Stephen Hu is producing the series.
The human player in this first game is 15-year-old Pan Tingyu 1P, who finished #1 in the Chinese professional qualification tournament in 2015. Pan has Black and plays a modern version of the mini-Chinese, and AlphaGo shows a new move in the upper left corner, which has since become the standard move for White in the Chinese opening pattern.
NOTE: The AlphaGo vs AlphaGo series, now up to Game 41, will continue through Game 55.