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Satisfying Victory

Most of you probably don’t know about go and so won’t appreciate this, but I feel like sharing anyway. I’ve been matching my wits against the computer for a few months—against GNU Go to be precise—and I don’t remember the last time I managed to capture such a large group of the computer’s stones (SGF).

I’m playing black in this game, as usual. The computer resigned after I placed my stone at G4. That whole group of white stones on the left is dead; there’s nothing white can do to make them live. With that, I’ve reduced white’s territory to the middle and top, not enough to have a hope of winning.

Actually, the game was lost several moves earlier when the computer placed a stone at G8 allowing me to seal its fate by extending my group at F6. There was no way to escape at that point as long as I kept my wits about me.

That felt good. Thank you for listening. :)

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5 Comments

  1. Jonathan Blake said,

    March 20, 2008 @ 2:02 pm

    Of course I don’t share all the times that I lose embarrassingly to the computer, but allow a man some pride. :)

  2. Seth R. said,

    March 21, 2008 @ 6:13 am

    You ever play Shogi (Japanese chess)?

  3. Jonathan Blake said,

    March 21, 2008 @ 7:34 am

    Once, but it was a very confusing experience lacking as I have no understanding of kanji. It seems like it would take a while to memorize the sizes of the pieces or the characters in order to get an intuitive feel for what’s happening. It seems like an interesting game, though.

  4. Wayne said,

    March 21, 2008 @ 12:09 pm

    Thanks for the info on this Go board. I used to play Go on Yahoo games does this interface have live player (not computer) capability?

  5. Jonathan Blake said,

    March 21, 2008 @ 12:15 pm

    The interface that I’m using with Gnu Go is qGo which can also connect to IGS—which is a very popular international server—and others. There’s also the KGS server which is very friendly and mostly frequented by English speakers.

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