here Make: DIY Projects and Ideas for Makers | is a discussion dating to 2007 - apparently the English speaking people involved (whether any of them reads an Asian language is unclear) couldn’t find such.
Well, so if millions of people enjoy go and spend time teaching it to their kids, wouldn’t it be nice if they could do it on a board that would remember moves, speed up counting, simplify replays for segments of the game play etc? Let’s say the board would look just like the normal 19*19 board but instead of putting stones you would make your moves with a stylus touching a “button”. Depending on whether the board is or is not a real screen, additional info having to do with statistics, controls etc could be displayed either directly on the board or else on a separate small handheld screen.
Any thoughts? Would that be yet another stylish gadget for people who like such? A dangerous innovation and a corrupting southern-barbarian influence? Or does this already sell in quantity in the Asian Walmart?
way back in the 80s (nintendo or sony??) it came with those family computer games, along with battle city and that carrier fighter game. was curious with it because of that van lusbader book, jian. they said the game had far more possible combinations than chess. a japanese visitor tried to teach me how to play it but it turned out to be boring, like most things japanese (to me that is.)
There’s already a format for recording/storing games and I have used the program Many Faces of Go to play back games and explore different lines against the machine (which isn’t terrible as far as desktop Go engines uh, go.
You mean like every Go program does? What would be the advantage of making a special-purpose “board” when everyone who has a computer/laptop/iPad/tablet/shoe-phone can download free software that does this?
playing over the internet is for people like me. People like Asian people reportedly play face to face on physical boards - between friends over tea, or with your little kid, or whatever. They have these boards in the store, so somebody must be buying, right?
So if system B has some advantages and system C has other advantages, it makes sense to make the synthesized system B+C that would combine the advantages while eliminating the disadvantages.
Tangential to the main topic: are the current Go AI’s still not up to the task of defeating a grandmaster at least? I’m guessing they’ll need quantum computers to pull it off.
In a word, yes. I don’t actually know anyone else that plays the game, and I myself haven’t played in 5 years. There are clubs, but there’s not much to be gaine by complicating a game which consists of a flat piece of wood and two colours of stones.
I enjoy Go and my eldest, after I had tried in vain to get him interested during grade school and High School, picked up an interest in it while in college by way of friends. He has now lived in Japan for three years and finds no one to play with. The only people who play, he says, are much older men. At least around him.
If there aren’t electronic Go boards, my guess is it’s because the AI isn’t strong enough. Doesn’t explain why they couldn’t make one that only recorded games and verified moves, but maybe that functionality isn’t strong enough to be successful in the market.
I wouldn’t, for example, buy an electronic chess board that could only be used in a two-player game to verify that all moves were legal and that recorded games – I can do both of those myself. I would (and did, many many years ago) buy one that I could play against when I didn’t have another human player, or could use to analyze games.
Perhaps. When I worked as a junior high school teacher about 5 years back I would occasionally see students play go or shogi during their lunch breaks. So it’s not only old men playing.
But I would imagine that for those who play face-to-face the aesthetics of the traditional board and stones is important.
I think an electronic board would be a bigger improvement for go than for chess. Chess has few pieces and easy to remember what is where. In go there are lots of pieces. They can fall off. If you want to stop and resume the game, you need to make sure the board remains untouched.
Even in terms of reviewing the game, I think that reviewing go is more interesting than chess. It’s longer and more complex, so there is more to review. And it’s also more localized, so you can review a fairly small battle with less mental effort than what would go into reviewing a major board wide campaign in chess.
And yeah, once you can review, you can also incorporate an AI that will give editorial comments about the more simple situations in the corners. AI may be dumb for the competent amateur players, but then many or even most hobbyists are not anywhere near the competent amateur.
In fact, maybe this approach could lead to a new form of hobbyist playing - “two study partners practicing with the help of AI”. If studying this stuff from books alone or on the computer with a learning program is kind of boring, maybe studying it with a friend and a learning program in the usual casual go game environment is more fun. Let’s say maybe it is more relaxing since instead of battling for mastery in a long game you are doing a friendly practice and hopefully learning something long term useful.
Aesthetically, well, it probably will not be a perfect imitation, but it can get fairly close. You don’t get to handle the stones, but it will look basically the same way. The big board of wooden color and the black/white colored dots, what more should we ask for.
