Even better news is that a number of startups and companies exist that manufacture kits based off of open source materials which will allow the simple assemble of pre-built components and the download of potentially free open source software to create a fully functioning, go playing, robotic arm.
Bearing in mind that the functions required to pick up and place a stone, this is very good news. However, thanks to the advent and rapid expansion of open source microcontroller platforms such as the Arduino, which can be purchased pre-built from a number of manufacturers or built from components costing less than a good steak at a fine restaurant, even moderately complex robots can be built on a modest budget. Well, that's mostly because it is somewhat difficult, in the sense that a very specific skillset is required, and could be expensive. I believe the solution to bringing online players into your home and onto your goban with real stones lies in robotics and software integration.
The sensation of placing a cursor on a computer screen and clicking, whether or not the particular server endows you with an audio clip of a stone clacking onto a board, can never be quite as satisfying as real gameplay. Experienced players, even professionals, can log on to relax and play teaching games or challenge each other. This opens up huge opportunities for new players to rapidly gain highly varied experience which simply cannot be found by traveling to their local go club once a week. The awesome reality of the our time is that a large number of online go servers exist which allow instantaneous gameplay and communication with players of all skill levels, all around the world.
Playing face to face, hands on stones on board, is undoubtedly the greatest joy of Go. Go is hell to learn, but then so is chess, when the geeks cackle.There is nothing quite like the sensation of placing a stone on a wood goban. And, fortunately, even us 28 kyu idiots can see the beginnings of unimagineable depths that provides this game's eternal fascination. Really, Go at the level GNU Go provides is not much more difficult than tic tac toe, once you learn to fire off more than one Kleenex deep layer of neurons. Go software is notoriously inept and provides the current "next big challenge" in AI research, but GNU Go is a great way to learn the basics. Sente's Goban is a virtual board which does a great many things, chief among them creating self-documenting Go games (Goban uses SGF files), watching or playing games on the major internet Go servers, replaying famous (and infamous) games of better players (or oneself), AND, LAST BUT NOT LEAST allowing you to humiliate yourself by playing against GNU Go 3.4 (or 3.6 if you download the latest) - which plays at the level of any 12-year old Japanese kid who's played for a few years. "Goban" is the Japanese word for the board on which one plays Go, and prices for these border on the ridiculous (primarily because Gaia does not grow 700 year old plum-yew trees fast enough to meet demand).
#GOBAN ONLINE PROFESSIONAL#
(I assume the clock only works for network play?) And a little documentation would have been dearly appreciated for these more obscure features.īut it's free, so those are only observations, not complaints! For the price, this is a super-sweet little program which will let you enjoy a game against the computer (until you are about 10 kyu or so, at which point you ought to be able to kick Gnu Go 3.7's butt regularly) and give you access to view all those downloadable professional game files, and your own online game SGFs, with ease. (Attempting to use them at all is one of the few things that glitches the program up!) There are some features-such as using a timer-which apparently can't be activated at all. It would be nice if the SGF editing features were easier to use. SGF files with alternate paths and on-the-board notations don't work quite so well. Goban is fabulously easy to use as a game, or as a bare-bones SGF viewer. I have not attempted to download 3.9 and use it as an alternate player, to be fair, but my attempts to do the same with other Go game engines have all failed. It comes with Gnu Go 3.7 built in, but Gnu Go is now up to 3.9.
#GOBAN ONLINE FULL#
The only reason I have not given it a full 5 stars is that it could use some updating and minor feature adds/fixes. I have only used it to play against the computer, as I use KGS's client software when playing on the server. I've been using this program for quite a while, almost daily, and have been very happy with it.
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