Tag: GoGoD

Moves to Unique Game

The Ke Jie vs. AlphaGo games quickly reached a position that was not in the GoGoD game collection of almost 90,000 professional game records: Game 1 was unique at move 5, game 2 was unique at move 7. To me, this seemed very early, and @badukaire on Twitter got me to wonder: How soon does a pro game usually reach a position that’s different from any previously played game?

Number of moves to unique game

Time for some data: I ran SmartGo’s fuseki matching on the whole GoGoD game collection (excluding handicap games). In that data set, the highest probability for a move to become unique is at move 8; the median is between move 11 and 12; the average is about move 13. Games are unique by move 7 in about 16% of games; by move 5 in only about 4%.

So it’s somewhat unusual to diverge from standard play that early, but there’s more variety of play early in the game than I expected. Also, I’m sure that a lot of games will soon be copying those moves by AlphaGo and Ke Jie, and those opening moves will be unique no more.

SmartGo 3 with GoGoD Game Collection

SmartGo for Windows is back. It’s in beta, but you can download and play with it, even buy it if you like: smartgo.com/windows.html

The big change is the inclusion of all 76,891 games of the GoGoD collection by John Fairbairn and T Mark Hall, the same collection used in SmartGo Kifu.

This is of course a free upgrade for current users. After several years without any changes, I’m calling this SmartGo 3 in anticipation of some more improvements down the road. However, the iOS versions and the perennially-in-progress SmartGo for the Mac are still the top priorities for now.

The current price is $39, down from $49. It will remain that way at least through the beta testing; I have not yet decided whether to restore the previous price once version 3.0 is ready.

Enjoy! And remember that it’s a beta release; please let me know if you run into any issues.

SmartGo Kifu 3.0

Almost five years ago, I started SmartGo on the iPhone because I wanted thousands of pro games and Go problems in my pocket; I figured other Go players would too. It started as SmartGo touch, with just 6,000 pro games, and no computer play. That evolved into SmartGo Pro, then came SmartGo Kifu for the iPad, and last year, SmartGo Kifu became universal, making SmartGo Pro obsolete. The recent additions of joseki analysis and tree view have pushed SmartGo Kifu way beyond what I imagined five years ago.

Today, I’m happy to announce version 3.0 of SmartGo Kifu with two exciting changes:

  • Clean new look and icons: The new modern look was designed by Scott Jensen (@_scottjensen) at Ender Labs. Many of the previous icons were remnants from the Windows version, and it showed. We also took the opportunity to streamline the user interface. This work started before iOS 7 was announced, and there’s more to do for iOS 7, but this takes a big step towards the future.
  • GoGoD game collection: John Fairbairn and T Mark Hall have been building their GoGoD (Go Games on Disk) collection for many years, and SmartGo Kifu now includes that collection of more than 73,000 professional games. An immediate benefit is better player name translations, and there’s more to come.

Before:

Kifu1 old

After:

Kifu1 

I also plan to offer the GoGoD collection with the Windows version of SmartGo. Unfortunately, SmartGo for Windows will be temporarily unavailable until that work is complete.