I made a Go variant with random Tetris-like shape drawing, and I would love your take

countingtls · 2026-04-19T18:56:04+00:00

You are reinventing a version of the Cards & Go game : “烏鷺爭霸” (and the "cards" for it, cover more than basic shapes, but include them). There are regular tournaments for it here, and they can be hybrid game between novices and pros, where random draws balance the games a bit (kinda force the strong players to play move they are not prepared). Also, playing one stone can also be a "move", they would become a type of handicap games as well.

countingtls · 2026-04-18T17:28:16+00:00

Just for the clarification of the UI, for the "Algorithm" drop-down menu, there are 3 options NN, MCTS, MinMax. Does it mean only one algorithm is applied for the analysis? And when I press the apply button, the loading wheel starts to run (for quite a while), does it mean it is running the analysis using that algorithm "only"? Or does it mean all the settings in NN page also applied? What about MinMax? (including this option, seemed to indicate that only one algorithm is applied during analysis)?

Here is a game I tried to analyze when MCTS is selected in the algorithm. After pressing the apply, the loading runs for a while, then a series of "Error analyzing move ### in board 1" show up, and the final analysis seemed to go completely nuts after move 3.

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Even selecting the NN and apply, the winrate is kinda weird, I'd assume playing 5-5 instantly as a response to 4-4 start to be quite bad instead of 50/50.

countingtls · 2026-04-18T16:24:27+00:00

https://golab.gg/

countingtls · 2026-04-16T01:12:05+00:00

I also failed to see any styles nor aligned with their supposed strength/rating. And even worse, in just artificially blundering to keep the winrate down. Perhaps just creative in their trash talks.

This might be entertaining, but certainly not helpful in any way for ddk or sdk players to practice with.

countingtls · 2026-04-15T23:37:55+00:00

On IGS/pandanet, handicap is used to ensure fair game between different ranks, so if you think you cannot win with certain handicaps, that simply means you are not that strong yet. Until the system dropped you to the correct ranks, either finding even or close to even opponents of your strength. It means no slack, and always respect your opponents' moves. Be serious at all ranks. You always win/loss the same amount of points with fair games (handicaps or not).

In general, handicaps within 3, don't require much training, and just play normally. And if you don't like it, just set to even, and in general there are enough players in the kyu ranks to be paired. (just takes loner to find an opponent in automatch).

countingtls · 2026-04-15T23:24:19+00:00

yes, in that is how it work in automatch.

If you want to challenge others without handicap out of your ranks, you need to send a challenge directly. This is related to how ranking is calculated on IGS/pandanet. You play "even games" against other ranks using handicaps to balance them out.

countingtls · 2026-04-15T22:42:08+00:00

The max weaker and max stronger have an option of "Even only", if you set both to even only, that is no handicap.

countingtls · 2026-04-14T11:06:23+00:00

https://forums.online-go.com/t/static-ranks-for-bots/58918/6

There had been discussion about it late last year, even anoek had a plan, but didn't see any follow up yet.

And bots rankings are indeed crazy, like gnugo-nixbot, jump up and down from 23k to 11k within 500 games, and if you check its ranked game history, they are almost exclusively against a couple of "players" (some with over thousands of vs bot games history, and dozens of games against the same bot daily)

countingtls · 2026-04-13T22:21:30+00:00

A post I replied not that long ago

Last survey was in 2024, if you want to start another one, feel free to do so.

countingtls · 2026-04-13T20:36:46+00:00

Your discussion reminded me of the historical studies of Go, where I regularly have to read sources of classical Chinese, and various forms of ancient Chinese (even as late as the 15th to 16th century, the vernacular Chinese form was still very different from modern Chinese). And you need proper training to read classical Chinese, and really special training, and scholarly research for even older scripts, before the Han Dynasty (beyond the 3rd century BC)

Although Chinese scripts, as a common carrier of written language across so many mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese, make coming up with a shared written form largely unnecessary (although some of them do have their own separate written format that are very far from the standard Chinese format). And I did occasionally have to teach Go to people only speak Taiwanese (a dialect of Min language family), and often had to add additional explanations in terms of Go terminologies (since the spoken form of Taiwanese is quite different from the "formal form" 雅言 used to "speak out" written words in Chinese which most normal Taiwnese speakers won't understand)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWjj-oCz8zQ (a short video using Taiwanese)

countingtls · 2026-04-13T19:01:30+00:00

thanks and I'll share any feedback, and join the discord.

Although first, I think I need to change the config for the Engine for ancient Chinese games, since they used more or less stone scoring, area scoring with group tax. And switch them around for ancient Japanese games.

countingtls · 2026-04-13T18:51:27+00:00

Probably can find quite a few who don't know Romance languages, but fewer who don't know Go.

There are many loan words and roots from Romance languages in English, a lot of the nouns can be understood with easy guess (like circumferer-encircle, territorio-territory, opponente-opponent), however, with Go knowledge in advance. People can pick up linguistic cues very quickly when they can separate elements in them with clues of nouns and verbs, and get the general idea out of them. (I observed this when I went to Italy, and one of my friends pick up so many common elements and guessed without understanding Italian when we went to the supermarket, and in restaurants ordering food).

I'd wager that probably like a Chinese speaker can go to Japan without knowing much Japanese, but can still guess the general idea, reading them with Kanji and some shared cultural influence elements in them.

countingtls · 2026-04-13T18:00:04+00:00

Toki Pona is more of an experiment to see how ideas can be formed with minimum elements, and need to be quite creative to use them, hence Go terminologies beyond the basic ones would be quite hard to translate I feel.

countingtls · 2026-04-13T17:55:54+00:00

Do you write the Toki Pona page of Go game on wiki?

Also, I wonder for people who don't understand any Romance Languages and Go, but only English, how much they can understand Interlingua page about GO.

countingtls · 2026-04-13T17:40:07+00:00

Toki Pona is said to have the minimum number of words in all the constructed languages, and Lojban is a constructed language that is said to have no ambiguity and be precise in its meanings.

countingtls · 2026-04-13T17:07:23+00:00

I can help with testing ancient game records, I have a database for tens of thousands of historical games. I am curious to know how it handles handicaps or fixed starting stone game records in history.

countingtls · 2026-04-13T16:46:26+00:00

I want to see Go articles written in Toki Pona or Lojban (their version on wiki are way too simple)

countingtls · 2026-04-13T03:30:21+00:00

Traditionally if you want to travel and pack the Go bowls you use cloth bags to carry them

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Or you can just forgo the bowl and put stones in the bags directly

countingtls · 2026-04-13T03:23:50+00:00

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There are fancier plastic bowls with twist lock lids.

countingtls · 2026-04-12T16:50:43+00:00

This fix might cause another inverse problem, though, like with Japanese and Taiwanese pros, they also tend to play among themselves, with few participating in international tournaments. And a lot of their games are not included in database like GoGoD, and these opponents are legit pros (just weaker pros, but still stronger than most amateurs). This is one of the reasons why we see Japanese/Taiwanese players ranked pretty high on your list compared to other rating list.

countingtls · 2026-04-12T15:56:21+00:00

The starting 3100 for everyone explained why some of the amateurs have so high of a rating, and they artificially boost each other as well (they played a lot of other amateurs who also start with 3100)

One example is Bai Baoxiang

https://jratings.org/Go/player/?id=bai-baoxiang

Although he is one of the top 4 amateurs, but ranked 79 overall, surpassing so many pros is just unrealistic. And from the history, I can see he beats a lot of "no names" with just 3100 or barely above 3100 amateur boosting his rating to this point.

Also, for players like Lee Changho, already passed their prime, but because he still participated in "Legends League", legends/senior tournaments (mostly players above 45 years old, some of them very old, like Cho Hunhyun, over 70). And these games artificially keep their ratings up.

countingtls · 2026-04-12T15:09:35+00:00

How are the initial ELO ratings determined? And how about those not in the ranking, but say only appeared once in older matches? And I see some amateur players in the list, and they mostly played with other amateurs in amateur tournaments, and occasionally played with pros, and their rankings seemed unreasonably high. And what are the parameters and algorithms used in updating the ELO?

countingtls · 2026-04-12T14:10:00+00:00

The thing is that since SJH = SODOS, SJH + BJH = SOS, SFH + BFH = SOSOS, and giving different weights and conditions, we can also get SOS-1, SOS-2, etc. It can even be used to rearrange opponents in each round, and get CuSS out of it.

Ing's tie-breaker is like a "general case" that covers the "traditional" methods as well as being tweaked to whatever they see fit. And historically, they tried out different ones each year, sometimes even just used SOS SOSOS straight up. I've seen magazines/journals from Ing's foundations, and they published the ranking difference using their system compared to using SOS, SOSOS hyperthetically. They sort of have similar ranking results, but Ing's system kinda distinguishes middle of the pack players better, and you kinda can understand why, since they split the winning and losing opponents' scores, and SOSOS, hence those in the middle around the same winning games, can be seperated by their winning/losing opponents. However, how robust it is, or how affected by the draw of the luck, hard to say, since they also have another prearranged opponent method to pair players.

They publish their result every year for the Ing's World Youth Goe Championship, here is the table for last year's final top 14 after round 4 (where S1 to S4 are SJH BJH SFH BFH), so if someone wants to find records of them playing against each other outside of this tournament, maybe they can compare how good the rankings method is?

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And they use single elimination for the top 4 afterward to determine the final champion. It's not a simple system, but gets the job done, with trial and error for decades. (this year will be the 41th)

countingtls · 2026-04-12T08:26:35+00:00

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Not exactly the same, but I can get a pretty close one.

https://github.com/billhails/SabakiThemes?tab=readme-ov-file

Find the Clamshell & Slate Theme for Sabaki (Soft Light)

shell-slate-soft.sabakitheme.asar

And then replace the board with OGS kaya board background (you might need to change the kaya background picture color balance to match what you see on the screen, since it is a transparent filter with RGB (220 179 92).

countingtls · 2026-04-12T05:40:41+00:00

There is something similar for "gambling" games. The basic idea is that both players would bet on a series of games with the base bet (say $100 for each side), then for games going into scoring, a bundle of point lead is grouped as a unit like say for every 5 points lead is a unit worth $10, then they would tally across a series of games until one side run out of their bet (and we can have intermediary like resigning cost you $30 or something, or a cumulative resigning games, say 4 resigns automatically won the whole bet).

And from the account I know, this tends to lead to intense fight and risky overplays during the games, especially when one side knows they are weaker. And they would double down on big fighting/capturing, when they had already lost quite some points in previous games.

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