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.”
American Go E-Journal
AlphaGo, KataGo, and the future of AI
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.
Go Spotting: This Is How You Lose the Time War
Saturday June 6, 2020
Adam Anaya reports that “Go is referenced many times in this creatively entertaining novella. ‘She decides she would describe it using terms from Go: You place each stone expecting it may do many things. A strike is also a block is also a different strike.'” This Is How You Lose the Time War was written by Amal El-Mohtar and Max Gladstone, and was one of NPR’s Best Books of 2019.
The AGA’s Ongoing Position on In-Person Play
Saturday June 6, 2020
The AGA believes that the health and safety of its members, and their communities, is a greater priority than in-person play. For this reason, the AGA is continuing to suspend all AGA-sponsored in-person events.
The AGA recognizes the value provided by in-person play and the camaraderie of Go communities. Because of this, we advise our members to follow all local laws as well as the advice and guidance of public health experts when deciding when and how to safely resume in-person play during the Covid-19 pandemic.
As always, the AGA encourages its members to play Go online. If you are looking for resources, check out this list of where to play go online, as well as this list of online resources, videos, and more. The AGA is developing more resources to help local Go communities stay connected and eventually resume safer in-person play. We are also in the early stages of planning online AGA events. If you have ideas (or online resources) that you want to share – for instance, things that have worked for your community – please consider writing an EJournal story (you can submit stories using this form) or sharing them with us through this form. We plan to publish some of the best ideas in the near future.
Redmond’s Golden Panda Cup commentary posted on YouTube
Friday June 5, 2020
If you missed last Sunday’s Golden Panda Cup live game commentary on Twitch, it’s now been posted on the AGA’s YouTube channel. Michael Redmond 9P – hosted by E-Journal Managing Editor Chris Garlock — reviews Pandanet’s “Golden Panda Cup” final-round game between Ichiriki Ryo — one of the top up-and-coming young players — and Shibano Toramaru, who won the prestigious Meijin tournament in 2019 at age 19, becoming the first teenager to achieve one of the seven major Japanese titles. Redmond also chats with Garlock about the resumption of professional play in Japan.
Tune in this Sunday, June 7 for Redmond’s commentary on AlphaGo vs AlphaGo Game 43; 8p EDT on the AGA’s Twitch channel.
Go Spotting: The Order of the Stick #1203
Sunday May 31, 2020
“There’s an amusing Go reference in the latest Order of the Stick, a Dungeons and Dragons style strip I’ve followed for years,” reports Mark Gilston. The storyline involves one of the characters finding a Go stone, whereupon another character recognizes it as a piece from a lesson that devolved into some confusion over what the game of Go was called in the vein of Abbot and Costello’s Who’s on First? Read it here.
Annual North Carolina workshop with Yuan Zhou 7d successfully held online
Sunday May 31, 2020
The twelfth annual North Carolina workshop with Yuan Zhou was moved online this year and successfully held Sunday, May 24th. Zhou’s lecture included a pro game review discussion the influence of AI on professional play, as well as reviews of games that the ten workshop participants had played with each other in preparation for the day. “Teacher Zhou put special emphasis at understanding joseki in light of new insights from AI, including new ways to look at the double approach against a stone at the corner star point,” reports a workshop participant. “‘We can learn from AI, but AI can’t talk. We still need humans to interpret, and understand the Go truths.’ Yuan said.”
Participants report that while there were some technical difficulties to be ironed out, the online format was successful. The workshop was sponsored by the American Go Foundation and the Triangle Go Group of North Carolina. Read a full report of the workshop and Zhou’s biography here.
–report and photo provided by the Triangle Go Group
50 years aGO – May 1970
Saturday May 30, 2020
by Keith L. Arnold, hka, with Patrick Bannister
May was dominated by Rin Kaiho’s defense of the Honinbo Title against challenger Sakata Eio. Already down a game, Sakata lost a bitter half pointer in the second game (top right) on May 7-8.
Those of you fortunate enough to travel (travel, I remember travel) to Japan will recognize this drawing (top left) – on May 8 the Nihon Kiin unveiled the plans for its “new” headquarters.
In the middle of the month Rin and Sakata squared off again (bottom right), and with a third straight loss on May 15-16, Sakata’s back was against the wall.
As of May 21, Fujisawa Shuko was leading the Meijin League (bottom left), with a 4-1 record, thanks to Takagawa Kaku’s victory over Kajiwara Takeo, giving them both matching 4-2 records.
Finally, the May 27 game brought the swiftest of ends to Sakata’s Honinbo challenge, losing in four straight games.
Redmond to review Ichiriki-Shibano game from Pandanet’s “Golden Panda Cup”
Saturday May 30, 2020
For this Sunday’s live game commentary on Twitch (8p EDT; note new time!), Michael Redmond 9P – hosted by E-Journal Managing Editor Chris Garlock — will review Pandanet’s “Golden Panda Cup” final-round game between Ichiriki Ryo — one of the top up-and-coming young players — and Shibano Toramaru, who won the prestigious Meijin tournament in 2019 at age 19, becoming the first teenager to achieve one of the seven major Japanese titles. Pandanet hosted the the “Golden Panda Cup”; Golden Panda is also what they called the player with the most wins, thus knocking out the most opponents.
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.