Life In 19x19

Oh, I have spent most of the previous three years on using KataGo, gaining new insight and can publish such in a couple of months, I hope.

Currently, I am a happy user of x64 / Nvidia RTX. However, it is unclear whether the RTX line of graphics cards continues as usual except for a delay or whether ...

Wrong pages

https://www.gokgs.com/download.jsp

used to be the correct page. Google still promotes www.gokgs.com, e.g. when searching for

"Kiseido Go Server" CGoban download

Sensei's Library and Wikipedia also still promote such on

https://senseis.xmp.net/?KGS
https://senseis.xmp.net/?CGoban3 ...

Nvidia Spark uses an ARM CPU, an RTX GPU, Windows, allows all Nvidia libraries including CUDA and TensorRT, and promises to execute all Windows softwares.

1) Can it emulate KataGo for x64-Windows at all?

2) Relatively how fast is this emulation?

3) Should there also be a native KataGo for Nvidia ...

1/2 point kos are extremely rare.

https://senseis.xmp.net/?RealHalfPointKo

I suppose instead you mean the last basic endgame ko. Its move values are:

1/3 under territory scoring

2/3 under area scoring without dame ko fight

4/3 under area scoring with dame ko fight

https://home.snafu.de/jasiek ...

During the previous 24h, L19 was unavailable for several hours due to database errors. An error message appeared with the suggestion to contact an admin but no email address of any admin was shown at the error message so one would not know how to report the occurrence of database errors when they ...

It is insufficient to consider values of followers and individual moves. It is also mandatory to verify whether long alternating sequences of several plays are worth playing successively to know from which followers to derive the initial move value.

I criticise every unverified local endgame ...

I do not know how Pachi does it but my study with KataGo has let me redefine joseki as "correct sequence for several standard openings judged by KataGo with sufficiently many playouts".

How are we to get John, Bill, and others


Bill stopped writing, IIRC, in summer 2021 presumably due to personal circumstances, which I suspect might be age- / health-related. It was two months before my publication of very much mathematical endgame theory, in which he would have been very ...

In the pre-AlphaGo-era, some professionals claimed that they would always beat God on H3, or was it H4? Anyway, I expect this prediction is in danger. OTOH, this is the chance for humans to beat AI down to H9 by a) exploiting novel trivial weaknesses of the neural net or b) complex life and death ...

Here are comments on part 1.

You study area deiri counting. Usually, one would use area miai counting.

For area miai counting, I (and others before me) have stated the principle "Usually, an area move value is 1 larger than a territory move value."

Unsurprisingly, for area deiri counting, you ...

Currently, when logged in, the Hamburger Menu "Quick links" contains "New Posts". One does not see this option when logged out. When logged in, initially the second row of the menu bar is "Board index . Life In 19x19.com General Topics . Announcements". When logged out, it is just "Board index".

I ...

Many thanks to everybody having brought L19 back to life! It is good that updated code makes hacking less likely.

if intelligent aliens exist on another planet, the game they would play would be go.

For a game to be reinvented remotely, several game design decisions have to be made. Go (with some reasonably simple ruleset) requires a comparatively small number of such design decisions. Simpler games, such as ...

In the paper Absolute Zero: Reinforced Self-play Reasoning with Zero Data

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2505.03335

AI learns from scratch on its own to create and prove problems of reasoning incl. deduction, abduction and induction for coding or mathematics in the manner of Alpha(Go)Zero or KataGo ...

MOST of the time we do not have the situation where A>B at a lower number of playouts but B>A at a very high number of playouts.

It is my observation in Katago study that it changes the relative order of most move candidates frequently for low numbers of playouts. A>B and B>A tend to change ...