Andrew Mobbs

Currently playing GnuGo at 13x13, taking 3 stones. I was winning fairly consistently at 4 stones, but at 3 it's beating me more often than not. However, this might change if I learn to be less careless during the endgame. I've lost 3 games like that tonight, 2 due to simply passing instead of filling in the bits I should be and one because of a truely stupid move that put about 8 stones in atari. I think mostly I'm just tired.

I do worry slightly that I'm just learning the way the computer plays, and not actually learning how to beat real people. I might try playing on a full sized board soon, then try my hand at Go on the net.

Ooops... after complaining I was tired, I found GNUGo's --replay feature and played with it for an hour. Very nifty, it tells you at each move the weighting GNUGo gave to each move. Very handy for reviewing games and seeing what you were missing, like an ignored weak spot that GNUGo keeps saying you should have played in, that later collapses. "Oh, yeah, I suppose it was obvious that early".

I got some of my work computers to play Go at lunchtime. I was curious as to how GNU Go development is going, so I got the latest development release (3.3.22) to play the 3.2 stable release. Both were compiled to play at level 10 by default, but with otherwise standard options.

Expecting the 3.3 version to be better, I gave it white. All games were on 19x19, Komi was 5.5 moku.

Overall, there were 18 wins for white, 13 for black.

So it looks like 3.3 is a little stronger, but not overwhelmingly.