Evolution of a Go program

About the development of Moyo Go Studio, software to (help) play the Oriental game of Go. Go is a two-player zero-sum game of perfect information. It is considered much harder than Chess. Currently, in spite of enormous effort expended, no computer program plays it above the level of a beginner.

Saturday, February 04, 2006

MasterGo 50% off

Since the MasterGo/AGA alliance hasn't been exactly nice to me, I thought, let's do a little comparison..

I had gotten a bit worried, since they are "dumping" MasterGo (they halved its price from 100 to 50 USD). It turns out I have nothing to fear :)

The upper left image is taken from the MasterGo user manual PDF, and illustrates how many Fuseki continuations are found (9) by their software, sorted by order of frequency. The image on the right is the same position in MoyoGo, with 26 Fuseki variations!

Why "only" 26? Because that's how many letters there are in the alphabet. (MoyoGo finds a few more exotic, low-frequency varations but doesn't display those, yet.)

Even when I disable all databases but the Pro database, I still get 14 continuations, all in the bottom half of the board.

posted by Franciscus @ 4:23 AM