Even before I had heard of Many Faces of Go, there was that go program called "Handtalk" , 20 years ago.
It was a dos program that came on a floppy disk. At the time, I bought at least 3 versions of it (same for MFOG )
Thanks to a program called "dosbox", I can run it on a win 10 laptop.

I set up a game between Handtalk (laptop) and Leela zero on an Android tablet (weights #157, 9 seconds per move) at H6, I entered the moves alternately on the tablet and on the laptop.
Leela zero Android performs well at handicap games, so, I suppose that it's the "dynamic komi version".
For me, it was a fun game, almost nostalgic !


LZ won by resignation, after a lot of killings.

PS. with this "dosbox", you can have at the same time a working win 3.1 interface, and your usual windows interface.
It's nice to run those very old DOS or win 3.1 programs

Very cool. I love the indie nostalgia component to it all.

Since its abandonware, does this work in VMware workstation? I don't have virtualbox

can you PM me a link?

If your computer can run a dos program, then you can run Handtalk.
Handtalk and Windows 3.1 aren't officially free, but on the other hand, they're not buyable anymore. You find them easily on the net.

I cannot run native dos in windows 10 so it has to be an emulator.

I actually see on internet archive that windows 3.1 is posted on there for free

by microsoft itself no less: https://archive.org/details/windows3.1

can't find handtalk though, will keep searching for a torrent


So on average gpu my computer, since Leela zero basically made zero progress since net 157 of more than 2 months ago, is handtalk stronger or weaker compared to a 40 block LZ on bad hardware? or does handtalk get the advancetage if the 40b playout is small

With win 10 , dosbox, and win3.1, you can run a lot of these old programs.

HandTalk is very weak...
It's old software, I think it's weaker than gnugo !

The latest LZ networks(172, 173) are slowly catching up with 157, so, there's hope

I've just begun a 20-game (twogtp) match between 157 and 173, at equal time setting. I'll post the result.

PS. check your PMs

Thanks I got it to work without having to install windows 3.1, all I did was use dosbox. It even worked inside of vmware workstation but the mouse speed was kinda erratic, (probably cause of nested virtualization) so I installed dosbox on my native host machine and it worked fine, but the resolution as understandable isn't great, which means on a large monitor it is just a tiny box really wish there was a way to stretch or otherwaise zoom/enlarge or magnify it some more. But it works great other than that...

It still plays at much higher level than I can, and I can't believe this whole thing is only 130kb... kinda reminds me of this nostalgic chess gem

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R3By_rdwxSg

Go Simulator 1991 https://www.old-games.com/download/7664/go-simulator
launched on Windows 7 through dosbox

Go Simulator is a Computer adaptation of the classic oriental strategic board game : the GO.

The Game is designed as a initiation to the go : it includes a complete tutorial to learn the basic rules of GO. Using the numerous available options, you can custom the game to adapt the difficulty : size of the board (from 9x9 to 19x19 lines), IA level (1 to 20), handicap (0 to 29 stones on the board before the game starts).... You can play against the computer or a friend, and even watch the IA plays against itself... IA is pretty impressive : it is a good challenger for beginners and experienced players

Graphics are fine, using the VGA Hi-Resolution mode (640x480 16 colors) but sound is almost absent : only a blip of the buzzer when stones are captured.

there you can download The Go Master (1991) https://www.old-games.com/download/5433 ... -go-master
Aya (2001) https://www.old-games.com/download/5071/aya

Around 40 years ago Byte Magazine published an article about a 1 kilobyte go playing program. It was worse than a human beginner, OC. It liked to play attachments.

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I know about a game program about 6 kb. I saw her a long time ago, but plays better than a beginner. for the Soviet PC "BK 0010"(1985)
https://r-games.net/524-go.html
the other day I will try to assess the strength of the game of this program

I found this website that seems to have a lot of info for those interested in the history of computer Go: http://www.computer-go.info.

There are a lot more people independently working on this than I thought.

Bill Spight mentions the 1kb Go program that appeared in Byte Magazine - the program and data fitted into 1kb (yes that's just 1024 bytes) and it was called Wally - it played on a 15x15 board. I am guessing that this was the first Go program to run on a personal computer. You can read about it in the April 1981 issue - downloadable from:

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine

you can filter to 1981 and its the one with the "Computer Watch" on the cover.

There is an excellent overview of the history of Computer Go from the British Go Association at:

https://www.britgo.org/computergo/history

John Tilley

That's an interesting metric for the complexity of a game: can you write a 1Kb program that knows all the rules? In chess, the answer appears to be no, according to this entertaining video: ZX81 chess could play most of a game, but didn't understand castling.

Wally perhaps gets closer than the chess programs. From the written description, it doesn't understand ko. But go games without ko are a bit more common than chess games without castling. It's also not clear whether Wally knows how to count the score or how to pass, so it may have needed human intervention to actually finish a game? Nevertheless an impressive achievement.

Thanks for the link to the Byte magazine archive. There go my next few weekends...

PS I found source code for a slightly enhanced version of wally at ftp://ftp.soe.ucsc.edu/pub/compgo/wally/wally.c It's 56K in size, and compiles to a 35K executable (after editing the source code to rename the "remove" function). Programming has got a bit less efficient since 1981!

The program for bk0010 plays only with handicap 9 and does not know ko. game against go169 (not finished, the outcome is clear):


Go169 http://users.ics.aalto.fi/praiko/go169/
probably the smallest full-fledged program (101 kb!), with support gtp, ~ 10k, with which you can play

program for bk0010 ~6kb https://r-games.net/index.php?do=download&id=466
easily runs on the emulator (bk_emulator_v30.zip ~5mb, English) https://r-games.net/index.php?do=download&id=883
I do not know other working programs of this size

please upload the compiled program here or on google drive

I don't think that's going to help you. I use Linux. If you're not on a Linux computer, then my compiled program won't work for you. And if you are on Linux, then compiling it yourself is very easy.

I'll attach the edited version of the code. If you can manage to install gcc for your system, then compiling wally should take only a couple of minutes. Rename the wally_edited.c.txt file to wally_edited.c (sorry, this site's policies don't allow uploading .c files), open a command prompt, go to the folder where wally_edited.c is stored, and type "gcc wally_edited.c". That's it.

thanks! yes, Windows. maybe I’ll figure it out somehow

I compile it with cygwin, it should have worked in most windows system.

thanks It works!

510 bytes! interactive GUI with undo and redo + rules of the game (with ko, but no superko). Next step: add 4-bit neural network, and beat GNU Go. https://twitter.com/Remi_Coulom/status/ ... 6450946048