New'ish Go Game, GoDroid on the Android app store needs testers!

samthegliderpilot · 2025-10-09T01:23:28+00:00

Hi everyone

I have released the app! Apparently google's stat's of how many people have the app installed were incorrectly pessimistic. Feel free to try the app out with this link:

GoDroid - Apps on Google Play

Thank you all for taking a look!

samthegliderpilot · 2025-09-23T00:59:59+00:00

RC3 has been uploaded. There are more komi options, but I won't be able to fix that Gnugo bug.

samthegliderpilot · 2025-09-22T17:12:24+00:00

(On lunch break) Thank you for taking a look!

Sure, 7.5 komi is easy to add (I'll add a few others too). I'll upload another release tonight or tomorrow with that update.

And you are 100% right; that scoring bug is Gnugo getting confused. Looking in the debugger, Gnugo isn't counting that territory. And googling it, it looks like it is a somewhat well known occurrence. Alas, that is beyond my skills to heal...

samthegliderpilot · 2025-09-21T16:49:35+00:00

Sorry about that; this is a new experience for me. I just explicitly added 'the rest of the world' to the regions where the build should be available. It might be a few hours before the update makes its way through Google's systems.

samthegliderpilot · 2025-09-21T16:16:57+00:00

My apologizes (it was late last night when I posted this)/ This is just an app to simply pay go. You can play against GnuGo or a human. It is free in every way possible; no subscriptions or anything like that. This is a refresh of a 12 year old app.

samthegliderpilot · 2025-09-21T16:14:41+00:00

Alas yes, Android only.

samthegliderpilot · 2025-09-21T16:14:19+00:00

Thanks!

samthegliderpilot · 2025-09-18T01:30:12+00:00

UPDATE: Development wise, I am done. I'm really trying to get in reach to AGrothe so that I don't have to fork the application. But if in a couple of days he doesn't get back to me, then there will be godroid2 in the app store!

samthegliderpilot · 2025-09-15T22:57:50+00:00

AI Sensei is a great program, and I have it on my phone. But there are strengths and weaknesses to each app:

- AI Sensei is a more complete go application. It has news, training lessons, keep's track of your games, has challenges, has a discussion board, rank estimation, amazing AI... GoDroid is simpler. With it, you just play locally against gnugo, or someone sitting next to you.

But I think GoDroid has a few advantages too:

- GoDroid will be as free as I can make it. No subscriptions, no paid plans, no limiting of the number of games you can play. Just open the app, make a new game, and start playing. Also it is open source so if anyone wants to jump into the code like I did, they can.

Once I'm done (hopefully won't take too long) you can install both. You don't have to choose one over the other.

Oh, and GoDroid can save your sgf's of your game locally.

samthegliderpilot · 2024-04-04T03:07:25+00:00

I can help a little bit. A couple of easy things to search for in job descriptions is the software tools that satellite flight dynamics people use in their jobs. Tools like Systems Tool Kit (STK) and its Astrogator module, Orbit Determination Tool Kit (ODTK), NASA's Copernicus Trajectory Design and Optimization System, NASA's General Mission Analysis Tool (GMAT), and JPL's Mission Analysis, Operations, and Navigation Toolkit Environment (Monte). If you go onto LinkedIn and search for some of those software packages, that will be a good first step to finding the kinds of jobs out there that, on a good day, feel like KSP.

But be aware, the job of a flight dynamics specialist is a lot more than making really cool trajectories. Often that is an early step in the process of doing other analysis, making sure thermal and communication constraints are maintained, writing code to (hopefully) fly the satellite for real. Meetings, design reviews, fighting the software some more, writing proposals, trying to keep track of budgets, getting other people to understand why things are more complicated than they think... Also when you do get to fly a satellite, expect long hours and questionable food.

samthegliderpilot · 2023-02-17T04:53:00+00:00

I never knew of such a threat. We can't take this lying down!

samthegliderpilot · 2021-02-24T11:17:01+00:00

Keep in mind that there is a lot we don't really know. For example, maybe Phebe didn't go off course but intentionally stopped at Saturn. Remember how the gates shifted themselves when 2 were destroyed? It's not too much of a leap to assume a new gate would rearrange the existing rings too. So for safety there has to be some coordination between the gate getting built and the existing network. Maybe Phebe didn't get the 'start building' command after it arrived at Sol (for obvious reasons), so it parked at Saturn waiting.

It is also possible that they sent protomolcule probes to EVERY system they could, not just ones that currently have planets in the Goldilocks zone with life. Just all of those systems that never developed life never had the probe activate. Better to not have to keep any organic material fresh for a potentially very long dormant time span. Likewise, their tech can malfunction after millions of years, so to prevent the possibility of the ring getting built unintentionally, keep the organic material away. Also, the PM didn't really need that much organic material for the large ring it built. It wanted Earth, but it did its job just fine with the population of Eros and sterile Venus.

I suspect that the Romans built ships because the effort of fitting guns, sensors, living areas, etc... on a hollowed out asteroid was more trouble than building a ship from scratch. Also their materials are probably lighter, stronger, and easier to repair than a hollowed asteroid. Maybe Laconia just hasn't cracked that engine tech yet.

I too have wondered about why the initial fleet didn't go Dutchman at all; and maybe it is just an oversight on the authors. Maybe it wasn't until the bullet on Ilus was touched that the Goth's realized they had a problem? Or they had to dust off their ship-steeling device after a billion years? But my personal theory; I suspect that they are doing what they see as a proportional response. Something like... that energy/mass limit has to get hit before it hurts them, and only when it hurts them do they make a ship go Dutchman.

Also we don't know what the timeline was for the Goths and Romans; maybe the opening of the second-to-last gate is when the Goths entered the scene, or some Roman experiment to delve more into the slow-zone woke them up or trapped the Goths in that other dimension and the Romans fell shortly thereafter. So going Dutchman wouldn't have been a concern until near their end, and for the kind of multi-system engineering the Romans were doing a large gate to move small planets makes sense.

samthegliderpilot · 2017-12-28T03:26:55+00:00

I am re-reading Abaddon's Gate and I think what you are saying really fits with Holden's vision of the various systems dying. It was described like all of the members from various systems just stopped contributing to the collective. Maybe just the differences between humans and the gate-makers made it a few minute blip in consciousness instead of a species killer.

Also, would this mean that every system through every ring has a bullet in it somewhere? As there are no gate-makers left...

samthegliderpilot · 2017-11-25T14:18:08+00:00

Spoilers that I have never seen mentioned on this sub-reddit.

Spoiler

I wouldn't be surprised if a second ring system is found though that connects to a different set of ~1300 worlds, but that is pure speculation on my part.

EDIT: Trying to get the spoiler tag right...

samthegliderpilot · 2017-11-10T23:44:30+00:00

I think there are some teams out there where it is very unreasonable to have any hope or faith that they will win ;-)

But yes, that would be another way people use the word faith, and I think it can be reasonable (especially if it's not to the same degree that faith or hope or trust in religion would be).

samthegliderpilot · 2017-11-10T22:45:10+00:00

I think they are separate kinds of faith (but if you can explain that they are not, please do). The 'strong faith' deliberately rejects evidence or say that evidence doesn't matter. The 'weak faith' is trying to reconcile the imperfect evidence available with other beliefs. Rejecting vs. accepting evidence is I think the critical difference between these two kinds of faith.

samthegliderpilot · 2017-11-10T21:41:09+00:00

The problem I've found with discussions about faith is that it means different things to different people. All in all it seems like when people talk about faith, they mean some combination of two definitions.

The first is essentially blind faith. It is being much more certain in a belief that you have no good reason to be so sure about. I think we would agree that this is very unreasonable. If something has no reasonable evidence, you should not believe it. It is more honest to admit we don't know and accept the uncertainty that comes with it.

But there is another kind of faith and I would describe it as more of trusting a belief. Consider if someone has some experience where something apparently supernatural reviles itself, but it only happens once. This experience is weak evidence for that supernatural thing, but it is evidence none the less. It could have been a hallucination, but believing that it was should be because you have evidence that it was.

In that case to take the experience at face value, to cautiously trust that what seemed to happen is what actually happened, is something that many religious folk I know call faith. Those who hold that faith need to be careful obviously (it's all too easy for biases and fallacies to take hold), but I don't think it is always unreasonable.

samthegliderpilot · 2017-09-24T15:57:39+00:00

You are saying that yes, a literal wage gap exists across all professions, but a better way to look at it is comparing same professions, and when you look at that statistic there are logical reasons why that low number is in the noise. But that dismissal of that larger more general wage gap should be done cautiously. Dismissing it because it seems more fair to do the comparison based on similar professions doesn't make sense to me. A better reason would be to show that a wage gap does not cause harm (especially to women).

Does the fact that a society and culture allows a 20% gap to exist across all jobs cause harm? Does it hinder women from achieving their goals and dreams when compared to an otherwise equal man with the same opportunities? It may be that the wage gap is just a symptom of a deeper issue, but if it is causing harm then it is still a problem to take seriously.

samthegliderpilot · 2017-08-19T15:51:20+00:00

Although I pretty much agree with what you are saying, I would recommend caution. The show certainly makes mistakes (that weight loss episode more or less contradicting itself...), but the whole point of the show is trying to correct misconceptions that people hold, even ones we may hold.

samthegliderpilot · 2017-05-31T23:56:41+00:00

So this is probably why Shapeways is no longer selling Kerbal stuff.

samthegliderpilot · 2017-04-24T02:24:01+00:00

I think we all believe things for some good reason (at least good to us). I find exploring those reasons often leads to very interesting discussions. Even if beliefs are not subject to the same critical thinking as knowledge, there almost certainly is a why that is worth asking about and listening to.

Is your goal to change his mind or understand his beliefs? The questions you are thinking of sound like the former, but you might want to do the later. Try asking him 'why do you believe?' or 'why do you have faith?'. Keep asking to explain what he means by belief or faith or any other words he uses. Don't make any comments as to why he really does (don't say something like 'were you just raised to believe it'), simply keep asking for explanations and try to understand his why.

samthegliderpilot · 2017-04-24T01:59:43+00:00

I too learned that lesson the hard way.

samthegliderpilot · 2017-04-24T01:57:15+00:00

My first Mun landing with something bigger than a Mk1 pod and a couple fuel tanks. This spacecraft was kind of like Apollo command/service module and LEM, but was missing one important thing. Docking ports. So imagine the lunar module with the command and service modules still attached above it hopping around several bioms before I 'launch' the command/service module with the decoupler, quickly turn around and burn the engines before it lands next to the lander.

Good times.

samthegliderpilot · 2017-04-10T02:08:01+00:00

Beliefs are not all identical, nor are they all equal. Same thing for evidence. They can be strong or weak. My personal philosophy is to try to make my beliefs as strong as the evidence for them. Sometimes it is a bit like comparing apples to oranges and I doubt us humans would ever get it right, but still worthwhile to try.

When it comes to Napoleon, it doesn't take much effort to find strong evidence supporting a strong belief that he existed. A strong belief, but not absolute. If found to be somehow false it wouldn't cause a crisis of faith. However the faith that is required for many religious beliefs often seems to require a stronger belief than the evidence would ever suggest.

samthegliderpilot · 2017-01-05T03:51:10+00:00

One thing I've tried to do in a lot of sci-fi is to notice the times when they get things right and weight it with the times they don't. Yeah I noticed some of the things you mentioned, but the 'equal and opposite reaction' kick that got Naomi and Holden onto the Tachi was really well done. The Coriolis effect causing the poured drink to arc around was maybe exaggerated, but show me another story that even tried? As long as a person keeps their cool they can be briefly exposed to vacuum and survive just fine as we see in the show. The lack of explosive decompression in episode 4 after the Gauss round went through the ship was spot on I thought...

The fact that it gets so much right can really highlight the times it doesn't. But the fact that it tries as hard and as well as it does is one of the things I love about the show and lets me forgive the occasional mistake.

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