American Go E-Journal » World

Go players wishing to participate in the 20th Pandanet Cup Internet World Amateur Go Tournament have until next Wednesday, December 9 to register. All games must be played on the Pandanet server. As in previous years, the registrants are divided into three regions, and in each region further divided into several ranking bands. Winners in each band will receive prizes. In the preliminary round, players play with others in the same band and in the same region. Regional winners then move on to play in the international final rounds. This online tournament is supported by International Go Federation and organized by Pandanet.

The preliminary rounds will be played December 18 through January 11.

Tonight’s Nongshim Cup game — which will be broadcast on the AGA’s YouTube channel starting at 9:30pm PST — is Gu Li vs Park Jungwhan. “We were actually the 2nd most watched live show on Youtube Gaming last night in that coveted 12:00am PST/3:00am EST timeslot,” reports Andrew Jackson. “That put us on the front page of gaming.youtube.com and got us a lot of random ‘foot traffic.’  Too bad the show isn’t more geared towards beginners!”
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How do you know what rank to choose when checking out a new go server? Maybe you visited Sensei’s World Wide Rank Comparison, maybe you guessed. “The team at OGS wants to dispel some of this mystery, so we’ve created a quick and easy survey to collect feedback about ranks of popular servers and we’d really appreciate your participation,” says Akita Noek. The brief survey takes less than two minutes to complete and you can see the results as soon as you are done. “So far we’ve garnered about 650 responses, but only 86 data points contain AGA data, which is a little over half of what we have for the EGF (146 responses),” says Noek, “so we’d really like to fill that gap a bit in order to get a good rank mapping to and from AGA ranks for the various servers.”

“The results will be used by OGS to further refine our rankings and ratings and bring our system in line with our users’ expectations,” says Noek. “We’re collecting rank data for all the main major servers as well as the AGA and EGF, as well as community impressions about how they feel about the ranks on different servers/organizations. We’ll be making the results of the survey public in both a summarized form as well as the raw data for anyone to use.”

The last few games of the current stage of the Nongshim Cup will be broadcast on the AGA’s YouTube channel Sunday and Monday nights, starting at 9:30pm PST. The Nongshim Cup is a major international championship with each country fielding a team of five players. The tournament is a “win and continue” format, where the winning player will continue to face opponents from the other countries, alternating, until only one country has any players remaining. This year, for instance, Ichiriki Ryo (right) put Japan off to a great start by winning the first three games (see GoGameGuru’s report here) Adding to the complications, the teams get to keep the order of their roster a secret: Gu Li or Choi Cheolhan will play the next player on the Japanese roster — but Japan won’t announce their next player until after Saturday’s match. “It’s a complicated format to describe, but ultimately each country is bringing their strongest players. Each national organization takes this competition extremely seriously, and we should get some real fireworks,” said the AGA’s Andrew Jackson, “I’m really thrilled Myungwan Kim has been organizing these broadcasts and I’m excited to see some world-class go!” The remaining players on the Japanese side are Murakawa Daisuke, Kono Rin, and Iyama Yuta. The remaining players for China are Lian Xiao, Ke Jie, and Gu Li. Korea still has Lee Sedol, Choi Cheolhan, and Park Jungwhan.

Demis Hassabis, the artificial intelligence savant behind Google DeepMind, hinted recently that his secretive team has cracked go, reports <re/code> magazine. While DeepMind has has put out a couple papers of its training algorithms beating Atari games it has released little else. Asked in an interview with the Royal Society of London “Maybe you will have a surprise about go?” Hassabis smiled and said “I can’t talk about it yet, but in a few months I think there will be quite a big surprise,” he replied.