American Go E-Journal » Tools: books, software & hardware

Plenty of go players have tested their hand against Leela, but what about Bender, or Fry? Ever wanted to play a go game against Dr. Farnsworth? Andreas Hauenstein has modified Leela Zero – an open source superhuman-strength go program – and created different “players” with different strengths after some experimentation and public feedback. That those “players” should be named after Futurama characters, Leela being the strongest, seems natural. To read a little more about his process and to test your skills against the character of your choice, take a peek at his English translation of a piece he wrote up for the German Go Journal here.

Would you like to have a t-shirt that shows a Go board with a Go stone getting captured? How about a tank top that depicts a ko fight? Tenuki Normal is a new clothing brand offering apparel with Go-themed imagery. T-shirts are available in men’s, women’s, and children’s styles, and tank tops and sweaters are also available. Check out Tenuki Normal’s website here; you can also find them on Facebook.

“Our goal is to create Go/weiqi/baduk/igo style clothing for comfortable and casual wear that stays true to the aesthetics of the game,” reports the company’s website. Founder Matthew Leong tells the E-Journal that Tenuki Normal is a nonprofit organization, and that 20% of proceeds will be donated to the American Go Association in support of its efforts to promote and sustain the American go community.
– Roger Schrag

by Brian Olive

Regular readers of the American Go Association E-Journal will be well-acquainted with the contributions of William S. Cobb, both as author of The Empty Board, a column published regularly in this journal for many years, as well as the publisher of many excellent go books through his own Slate & Shell publishing company. Through his writings, Cobb has challenged us all to think more deeply about why we love this game so much. Through his publishing – and, by extension, through Slate & Shell’s generous sponsorship of countless go tournaments around the country – he has worked selflessly to spread his own love of the game.

Mining the same veins of thought expressed in The Empty Board, Cobb has published other, deeper musings on the meaning of Go, especially as it relates to the core teachings of Buddhism. One such article (available here) was published in 1999 in Tricycle: The Buddhist Review. Entitled simply “The Game of Go”, this article explores Go as an aid in the search for enlightenment, an endeavor that, Cobb posits, is on par with other traditional meditative practices such as the tea ceremony and karate. Twenty years later, this essay still shines as exemplary on two fronts: its easy introduction to the game for those not familiar with it, and its deep look into the meaning of the game. It is worthwhile and fresh reading, even for those who have been playing go for years.

As a tip of our collective hat to Cobb’s contributions, what follows is a brief recap of some of the key ideas that emerge from his article in Tricycle. Although this comes at the risk of losing some context, or inadvertently reinterpreting Cobb’s views, the hope is that something said here will encourage you to both read the article for yourself and to think deeply about the meaning of Go. What does the game mean to you? Is Go all about ‘the win’? Or, perhaps, can this millennial endeavor be a way to enlightenment? Feel free to share your thoughts. Here are some of Bill’s:

Go fosters humane attitudes

Cobb rests squarely on the history and tradition of Go to support this claim. From the days of buddhist monks teaching go to samurai, to the continued popularity of the game in Asia and its growing presence in Europe and America, Go has been used as a means to “instill the virtues of overcoming fear, greed and anger”. Any Go player who has played – and lost – any significant number of games can feel the sweet pain of truth in this idea. We’ve all suffered from our greed mid-game, and we’ve all won games based on mustering up sufficient patience and balance of play. Go teaches us these things.

When played properly, you lose about half of your games

On the surface, this statement speaks to Cobb’s full embrace of the handicap system in Go. In theory, when playing with a handicap, we should win about half of the time. If we are improving, and therefore winning more times than not, then we adjust the handicap and get back to winning just half of the time. Most see this as a way to give other, weaker players, a fair chance. This is perhaps true, but Cobb takes it further: this is how go should be. We are, in his opinion, better off when constrained to both winning and losing. Equally. Put another way…

It cannot be good to win in go, because it is not bad to lose

Tightly woven into this surprising idea are the core threads of Cobb’s idea of Go as kido or, the Way. Many play with the singular motivation of winning. For many, it’s all about ‘the win’. We watch go videos, read go books, attend go lectures, all to improve our play and win games. We track our rating, with our sights set on ranking up. Cobb, on the other hand, proposes that the point of playing is to open oneself to the initial emptiness of the go board, to explore the interconnectedness of the stones, to appreciate the impermanence of value and structure, good and bad on the go board, and to lose oneself (i.e. experience no-self) in this act of creativity. Much of the article expounds on these key ideas, which happen to represent the four fundamental Buddhist principles.

In case you missed it, find the article here. photo by Phil Straus.

Earlier this year, the E-Journal reported on Haris Kapolos’s Multilingual Go Book project, the goal of which is to create a book “that could circulate in libraries, schools, universities and game shops… in more languages [than just English and Greek] and have it be free for everyone.”

Kapolos recently wrote us to announce “the full translation of the book in French. The translation was made almost entirely by Jean-Luis Tu.” Significant progress has also been made on a Brazilian Portuguese translation, with almost three chapters complete, by Lucas Félix de Oliveira Santana. The website has also been fully translated into both languages.

“The whole English version has been proofread and some diagrams were corrected,” writes Kapolos, “Also, I have re-aligned most of the text boxes and image boxes in the book and it looks much better now.”

Kapolos is looking for more collaborators: “The current [translations] that have volunteers working on them and on which it would be great to receive more help are the Dutch, the Russian and the Brazilian Portuguese versions.”

If you’re interested in getting involved, the project is looking for people to create translations in their own language, proofreaders, and donations.

ArenaGo is a new Android app that contains over 50,000 professional matches searchable by player, country or date. Nice stone graphics, flags to represent nationality, and the ability to select favorite players might interest go enthusiasts. Users can manually advance through games or choose an adjustable auto-play speed. Game records are current as of 7/27/2019 with over 1,400 players and 23 countries represented.

The following link will take you to the app in the Google Play Store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.arenago.android

An IOS version is under development.

-editing and screenshots by Ryan Woolgar

Robert Jasiek has released two new endgame Go books, his 15th and 16th. “Endgame 3 – Accurate Local Evaluation” distinguishes local gote from sente endgames objectively and evaluates local endgames accurately. “Even for long local sequences, we determine the right moments of playing elsewhere,” Jasiek says. Click here for sample pages. “Endgame Problems 1” has 150 problems, of which 20 are new tactical problems on the 11×11 board and 130 are evaluation problems. “Their detailed and correct answers calculate the counts, move values and, if necessary, gains of the initial local endgame and every follow-up position,” says Jasiek. Click here for sample pages.

Reading interactive go books used to be limited to iPad, iPhone, and Mac. “Not any more,” says SmartGo publisher Anders Kierulf. “Most of the 134 books at gobooks.com are now available as ePub, so you can also read them on Android and Windows.” Diagrams and problems in the ePubs are interactive. “The DRM-free ePubs let you read your books on different devices, and future-proof your investment in books.” Click here for more information.

Go Books now contains 134 books about go, and includes new books by Richard Bozulich on “Attacking and Defending Weak Groups” as well as “Sabaki – The Art of Settling Stones”.  The GoGoD game collection now contains over 102,000 pro games, and is part of SmartGo Kifu, SmartGo for Windows, and SmartGo for Macintosh. To stay up-to-date, follow @smartgo on Twitter or SmartGo on Facebook.

Deep Learning and the Game of Go  by Max Pumperla and Kevin Ferguson, teaches all the aspects of deep learning that went into Alpha Go. It is complete with code in Python3, with all code based upon building a go-playing program starting with code for the board structures/objects. It does not teach Python and does not assume you know anything about learning algorithms. I am only in the 4th chapter and so far I find the text very readable and the explanations clear. By the end of the book you can have a complete Go bot for playing or experimenting. One very nice thing that Manning does is that all the code is available for downloading, and buying the paper book allows you to signup for electronic versions in a variety of formats, so you can copy/paste the examples if you don’t want to type them and you can search the text electronically rather than paging through the book. About the only thing not covered in the book is parallelization for multiple GPU/CPUs.
– David Doshay