I wonder how flexible the CrazyStone program is? I am thinking it might be good for training against much stronger players. Can it finish already started games, given an sgf, and can it back up and do variations? Are there other programs that are suitable for training?

http://www.unbalance.co.jp/igo/eng/

On a decent machine it is at least mid dan KGS if not a bit better.

You can load a game, go to any point, set up the AI to play either side (not both) and play from there. I'd steal an idea from chess here, set up a "won" position, see if you can hold it against a bot 9+ stones stronger than you. Just don't make it too "won" or the bot will play crazy moves before resigning (don't disable AI resigning or it will go a bit bonkers if you get too far ahead).

It doesn't do variations, if you play out a sequence and then go back to an earlier move and resume play, all moves after the resumed move will be deleted. You can however save the sgf and then go back to do another variation, then you could probably combine the sgfs later into the one (I've never done this but I assume it's possible by copying and pasting variations).


All the above is on the 2012 version, I'm assuming the UI of the 2013 version is the same, the only thing they talked about much was a stronger engine in it.

This is a good program for practice; my main disappointment is that on my current hardware, the software takes rather long to take a move on the most difficult level. I can force it to play a move faster, but the quality degrades.

Still, I'd recommend this software.

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be immersed

Sounds like I'll be holding off until I get a better cpu.

I wouldn't say that this is necessarily a limitation for others with the program - maybe they can comment. Like I said, you can force it to play moves, which degrades the move quality, but allows for you to customize how long it takes to play (though sometimes when you force it to play a move, it still takes a couple of seconds to actually play).

Also, it's entirely possible that the system I am running the software on is inferior to yours...

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be immersed

It takes ages to move on Level 10 on my PC and I've a 3.3 GHz i5 processor, which is far from mediocre. I think the levels are more about how long the AI is allowed to think that an actual strength level.

Perhaps, but I do believe that the moves are weaker when you force the AI to play faster.

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be immersed

Well, yeah, due to how it "thinks" any reduction in time per move is going to affect it most of the time.