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Twitch plays Go

usgo.org

58 pointswj20 comments

For those new to the game of Go, one aspect of the game that makes it so much fun for me is the way that a good commentator or author can tell an entire story around the game (and Will Lockhart is one of the better commentators). Attacks, counterattacks, being bold vs being cautious, going for territory or strengthening defenses...a good game commentary can be more enthralling than many novels.

This also means that an individual's personalty shows through in a game of Go more than it would for, say, Chess. I know I'll never be a top-tier player, but I also know that by improving my Go game I can improve my performance in other aspects of my life. I am often impetuous and overly-optimistic. In Go, this means that I tend to attack when I should defend, and when I do defend I tend to do so imperfectly. In life, it means that I often start more projects than I can finish. So, in a way, Go is my own personal meditation strategy.

Finally, for those who want to get into the game but may not have time to play a full game in one sitting, I highly recommend Dragon Go Server (http://www.dragongoserver.net/). Games are played out in "correspondence" style. This means that a game may take a long time to play, but it also means that the play tends to be very strong. I'm personally only 14kyu on DGS, whereas I was 11kyu on KGS 3 or so years ago (back when I had time for it).

What gave you the misapprehension that chess doesn't have bold and cautious attacks and defenses, and dramatic games? It certainly does.

Oh, I realize that personality plays some roll in chess, but I think the degree to which is shines through in Go is on a whole other level. There is only so much you can do in chess that is still considered sound play. For example, you keep your queen back if you're a cautious player or bring it out early if you're not, but doing something like sacrificing your queen early in the game to take a pawn would just be regarded as stupid.

There are many fewer truly "stupid" plays in Go, especially early in the game. In fact, if you look at a lot of the commentary around the games that Alpha Go played, one thing said time and again was how Alpha Go made moves that seemed "amateurish" only to follow up later with connecting moves that seemed almost prescient.

Promotion for "The Surrounding Game", which looks like a gorgeous documentary. As Lee Sedol claims in the trailer: "It's the most difficult game ever devised by humans"

Watching highlights of Fortnite 100-player battle royale matches where Ninja is racking up multiple kills per second really makes you wonder if a bot with visual recognition, building strategy skills is achievable in this generation. It's a lot of information. Resulting in a massive decision tree. Bot AI used to be pretty decent back in the UT days. I wonder if Epic is thinking about employing them now to pad the games and increase engagement?

Does EPIC add bots to fill in the 100 for BR?

https://www.epicgames.com/fortnite/forums/battle-royale/roya...

> really makes you wonder if a bot with visual recognition, building strategy skills is achievable in this generation. It's a lot of information. Resulting in a massive decision tree.

It really depends on how the bot accesses the game, especially the controls. A bot with direct access to the motion of their character will have 100% accuracy and precision. One that has to use physical controls is far less likely to outpace humans so easily.

Not exactly what you're saying but there's a cool project on twitch called Battlecode - "MIT's premier programming competition!"

https://www.battlecode.org/#/

Both teams program AI armies that are then dropped into a map with terrain/resources where they have to adapt and try to win.

I love watching this stuff but then I was the kind of kid who would sit and watch two AI football teams play each other in GameDay '98.

I didn’t know about the Twitch game platform, but I have been playing Go for over 50 years - glad to see potentially many new people getting introduced to the game!!

I learned it as a kid and played until my professor died.

I don't play either much but prefer it to chess.

I'd say the sudden traction comes from the tv show Counterpart: the opening credits feature a board of Go.

* spoiler alert *

If the show is definitely worth watching, it doesn't show much of the game itself. I would say this is a good way to tease gamers into (re)discovering it.

As to why it is featured, the game philosophy is about the uncertainty of a win, capturing your adversary is never a definite thing.

I think the show actually needed to introduce Go to explain it's depth.

Hoping you will enjoy both :)

There has been a big resurgence in Go interest after AlphaGo beat the world champion last year. That made a lot of headlines, and brought in a lot of interest.

The AlphaGo documentary on Netflix is worth watching, if you have an interest in Go, or AI.

And that's ironic because AlphaGo's achievement was proving/making Go too easy for a computer / hard for a human to play well enough to be worth investing resources in making a human good.

Can we get Twitch Vs AlphaGo? I would pay to watch that.

I’d really like to see a propose-and-vote crowdsourced game against AlphaGo. Can 1000 players, with appropriate ranking and selection of moves, perform well? There’s precedent for Chess using basic plurality voting:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kasparov_versus_the_World

It wouldn't be very entertaining; AlphaGo would just win. Twitch isn't going to play very well.

twitch vs twitch would be more insteresting

It would be like watching Indiana Jones at a swordfight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=anEuw8F8cpE

Is this going to have the crowd voting on moves, like Twitch Plays Pokemon? If so I think the game might go on for a long time (or a very short time if people spam "pass"). If Go doesn't end by mutual consent then it tends to go on for a very long time before the board fills up and it becomes literally impossible to play.

You could run the board position through a Go engine and only pass once the engine decided it was time to pass.

Yeah, I think that would work well.

That's great, please post a link here when it starts :)

Its on the main channel: https://www.twitch.tv/twitch

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