SmartGo One incorporates KataGo, a really strong go engine. For most players, it’s too strong. While you can increase handicap until you manage to win, getting beaten mercilessly is not that enjoyable.
The newest version tries to make playing against the computer more interesting. When you start a new game, you can choose between five different levels, from ‘SmartGo++’ (full strength, playing as well as it can) to ‘SmartGo—’ (making more mistakes and even some blunders). The default is the middle of the road ‘SmartGo’ that will try to make the game more balanced.
The trick with dumbing down computer play is that you don’t want the computer to play non-sensical moves. The approach I’ve taken is that SmartGo will still select one of the moves that KataGo generates, but instead of always picking the best move, allow it to choose moves that lose points or reduce its chance of winning. If the computer is further ahead, it can lose more, bringing the game closer to balance.
This is a first stab at this feature, I will likely refine this in versions to come. Please let me know how this works for you: Do you always keep the computer at maximum strength? Is the lowest level still way too strong? Do you enjoy playing against the computer more?
Tap on the Hint icon, wait a few seconds, and a dot on the board shows you where KataGo thinks you should play. This minimalist version of Hint is now a thing of the past.
The newest version of SmartGo One makes Hint much more useful:
(1) It can show you multiple top moves that KataGo is considering. It uses the familiar color scheme from Lizzie: teal for the top move, green for other good moves, brown for moves that were considered but are not as good.
(2) It can show you the principal expected move sequence.
(3) If you like more information density, you can see top move choices and move sequence at the same time.
(4) You can easily switch between these display modes with a long press on the Hint icon.
(5) You can give KataGo more time: Settings > Computer Play > Time for Hint. If you set it to ‘Unlimited’, tap on the Hint icon again to stop computing.
(6) If you only see part of the board and the best move is off-screen, SmartGo pans the board to bring the best hint move into view.
(7) There’s now a keyboard shortcut for Hint: Cmd-K (think KataGo).
(8) Hint is now available on the toolbar in Replay mode, not just Play.
TL;DRSmartGo One now includes a powerful Guess Moves feature for pro games. You can also combine guessing with pattern matching to train yourself on joseki variations.
Guess moves
Pick a pro game, turn on Guess Moves, then at each turn think about where you would play. As you then play each move, SmartGo will tell you whether the move was:
(a) exactly where the pro played, or (b) at least in the right area, or (c) at the right spot, but your timing is off, or (d) whether you’re in the wrong area entirely.
This is a great way to study pro games and learn about your blind spots. This SmartGo Kifu feature didn’t make it into version 1.0 of SmartGo One, but now it’s back, significantly better.
If you’re lost, tap on Hint, and it will reduce the remaining possible area by about 50%. Still lost? Tap Hint again to narrow the search further.
New in SmartGo One is the ability to guess moves of only one player – just choose whether you’re guessing both colors, only black, or only white. Another new feature is the ability to change the size of the area considered ‘near’. It defaults to a Manhattan distance of 5, but you can now set that anywhere from 2 (more difficult) to 7 (easier).
Joseki training
New in SmartGo One, you can combine guessing with joseki or fuseki matching. In this case, SmartGo will just give you a right or wrong answer – getting close in joseki is not good enough. Of course, this feature also works for guessing both colors or just one.
When guessing a joseki move, one of your choices is to tenuki (play elsewhere), and SmartGo will let you know whether that is indeed a position where it’s okay to tenuki.
At any point, you can turn on Hint to see the full joseki information for the current position. Note that obscure variations that have rarely been played are counted as wrong.
Restrict games for matching
You can now choose to use only recent games for pattern matching, instead of always matching in all games. Joseki change over time, and some drastic changes have happened in the last years since AlphaGo. (See e.g. the just released ‘Joseki Revolution’ book by Shibano Toramaru.) For example, comparing the attach-and-pull-back joseki in games since 2016 with games since 2020, the solid connection has gone from 48% to 91%, and tenuki from 18% to 2%.
When you train joseki, it uses the subset of games you’ve specified in Settings > Games > Games to Match.
Future
SmartGo Kifu kept track of your percentage of exact and near guesses. As yet, SmartGo One doesn’t keep track of any statistics, as the feature is mainly designed to help you learn. But trying to beat your previous percentage might add some motivation, so I will likely add this in a future version. Please let me know what statistics you would find helpful.
Enjoy! Let me know how you use this feature, and if there are any tweaks that would make it more useful to you.
TL;DR SmartGo One is an all-new version of SmartGo for iPhone and iPad with improved user interface, more features, better integration, and stronger computer play. It’s your one app for learning, playing, and studying the game of go.
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I just released SmartGo One, the all-new version of SmartGo. It’s a free app replacing both SmartGo Kifu and SmartGo Player, with the books from Go Books fully integrated – one app for all your go needs. Currently for iPhone and iPad; a Mac version of SmartGo One is in the works.
I’ve written a separate blog post on the business aspects of replacing two apps with a new app and a different business model. In this post, I will focus on user interface and features, highlighting the changes from SmartGo Kifu. For details and a full list of features, see the user manual in the app (Books > Tutorial & Help > SmartGo One User Manual).
Overall user interface
SmartGo One features a more modern visual look (thanks to designer Scott Jensen), including dark mode (swipe two fingers down/up on the board to turn on/off). Navigation is more standard, using a tab bar on iPhone and the familiar three-pane layout on iPad.
SmartGo One on iPad in dark mode
Other improvements:
Ability to use whole screen on iPad
Multiple windows on iPad
Continue where you left off on another device
Much smoother scrolling
Strong computer play
The old SmartGo apps used my own playing algorithm based on Monte Carlo Tree Search. This was fine pre-AlphaGo, but AlphaGo raised expectations. SmartGo One integrates KataGo, a very strong go engine. However, the current implementation only uses the CPU (no GPU or neural net), so it’s not yet as strong as e.g. ‘Master of Go’.
Playing against SmartGo
The current score and winning percentage can be shown while playing against the computer. End-of-game handling has been refined significantly.
File management
SmartGo One lets you manage SGF files locally on your device as well as sync between devices using iCloud Drive. Huge improvements in this area:
Organize files using folders
Create and manage SGF collections (one file containing multiple games)
Work with zipped collections (one zipped file containing multiple games): e.g. if you get a zipped game collection from the Go4Go game subscription service, you can directly open that whole collection
Game imported from Go4Go zipped collection
Convert between folders and collections
Reorder games in collections
Drag and drop games into folders, onto collections, or onto books
Handle files with go problems (PRB) and go books (GOBOOK)
Cloud syncing
iCloud is used to sync your state across devices, between your iPhone and iPad (and Mac in the future). Here’s what’s synced:
Preferences (the ones that make sense)
Games stored in iCloud Drive
Your progress in solving problems
Games, problems, and books marked as favorites
Game annotations of pro games
Current reading position in your books
Gobook files
The gobook format (smartgo.com/pdf/gobookformat.pdf) is used for the books in the Go Books app. In SmartGo One, you can convert annotated games into your own book.
Pro game collection
SmartGo One offers more games than ever before (currently 114,000). The pro game collection can now be updated without updating the app, so expect more frequent game collection updates (whenever GoGoD releases a new version).
Player names
The names dictionary (by John Fairbairn) is now a separate tab with more than 4,400 entries:
Better presentation of player info
Links between different players, making it easy to explore and navigate between players
Search in players finds that player as well as related players such as teacher, or mentions in go style or bio
Explore links between different players
Problem solving
The go problems (from goproblems.com) are better organized, and there are more problems available.
Improved flow to work through problems
Improved display of statistics
Your problem stats sync between devices
Additional problem collections available
Better mechanism for updating problems, allowing issues to be fixed more quickly
Game play and recording
SmartGo has always excelled at replaying, recording, and editing game records, but SmartGo One improves on it in several ways:
Improved New Game screen
Edit game info directly inline, not in separate popups
Easier to go to a particular move
Easier to correct a particular move
Improved feedback while inserting a move or move pair
Quick access to frequently used board display settings
Easy access to board display settings
More discoverable and reliable board rotation, with a panel adding related functions
Rotating the board is a snap
Books
All 150 books from the Go Books app are directly integrated into SmartGo One. (If you bought books in Go Books, you can read those in SmartGo One.) Compared to Go Books, there are a number of improvements:
Better organization of books, including currently reading, recent additions, most popular
Keeps track of up to three books you’re reading right now
Search in book list
All book purchases can be shared with Family Sharing
Pattern matching
Finding games that match a given joseki or fuseki works as before, but has been improved:
Faster matching
Clearer display
Easier to get to and return from the list of matching games
Still missing
A few features didn’t make it into the 1.0 release of SmartGo One:
Guess Move: This will be added in an upcoming version.
File formats: Reading go game files other than SGF is not supported yet.
Localizations: SmartGo One is English-only right now.
SmartGo Kifu and SmartGo One can happily coexist on your device, so just keep SmartGo Kifu around for these tasks.
Future
SmartGo One builds on decades of experience with computer go, and creates a new foundation for the next decade. By bringing games, problems, and books into a single app, it opens up lots of possibilities for the future – stay tuned.
I wrote about my new Mac Pro a year ago. It’s still rock-solid, and it’s done everything I asked of it. But the writing is on the wall: Apple’s new $1,000 MacBook Air is now comparable in speed to my year-old $10,000 Mac Pro. This year, Apple will likely release updated MacBooks Pro with more cores and memory and blow right past the performance of my Mac Pro. Next year, an updated Mac Pro will do the same again.
I had hoped to get seven years out of it? That was before Apple announced the switch to their own chips, and before they blew Intel chips away with the performance of the M1. My expectation was based on the incremental performance gains we’ve seen from Intel over the last decade, not the paradigm shift ushered in by Apple’s M1. The Intel-based Mac Pro is rapidly losing value, and it’s clear I’ll want to replace it as soon as I can.
My Plan
Here’s my current plan; we’ll see if Apple releases the right products in the right order for this to work out.
Mid 2021: Buy the rumored 14-inch MacBook Pro. I expect it to be faster than my Mac Pro for all practical purposes. Hook it up to my existing two monitors and use as my main machine. Sell or trade in the Mac Pro before it loses too much of its value.
Mid 2022: Evaluate the new Mac Pro, and possibly upgrade to that one.
External Displays
I’m glad there are finally some rumors about cheaper external displays. I think Apple was waiting to release monitors until they redesigned the iMac, so the monitors could match the look of the iMac (ideally using the same enclosure with simpler innards). And they were waiting with the iMac redesign until they could use their own chips, both for lower thermal requirements and to be able to include Face ID. Now their ducks are finally all lined up.
It makes too much sense for Apple to plug this hole in their lineup. And the work Apple has put into making resolution switching seamless also makes more sense if monitors are on the horizon. Here’s hoping — I’d love to replace the LG 5K with an Apple monitor with Face ID.
So while my Mac Pro didn’t turn out to be the long-term investment I had hoped for, I’m stoked about Apple’s M1, and very excited about what they’ll announce this year and next.
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