Dragon Go Server | Hacker News Reader

Dragon Go Server

dragongoserver.net

85 pointsTomte32 comments

I'd strongly recommend OGS if you would like to play Go online (no affiliation,just a happy user). https://online-go.com/

r/baduk also has some good resource for learning more about Go :)

Is this the lichess of the Go world?

Sort of. OGS is the Lichess of the English-speaking world certainly. There are several much larger servers if you speak Korean/Japanese/Chinese, but they also have less in common with Lichess.

Back when I was playing, KGS was where everybody was playing. What happened? Just normal competition?

KGS is still huge, but OGS has been consistently adding feature after feature for years. At some point, my impression is that most English people just realized it has a nicer interface and better analysis and cheat-detecting tools. The main downside is a lack of high-dan players.

(I don't have data to back this up, just my experience as a roughly 1-dan player who hangs out with a lot of U.S. Go folks)

In my experience, KGS is nowhere near as popular as it used to be, sadly. Tournaments dried up, player base dwindled and it's not the same

How do you cheat at Go? The only thing I can think of is cheating by self-playing thus gaining illegitimate rank?

Main way is using an AI to tell you what the next best move is.

You could cheat in many ways.

One way might be to use a Go engine to analyse the best moves for you as you play. Even for non online play this is already a problem with Chess games and hidden smartphones. Everyone has a 9d bot at their disposal these days. And of course one could make use of cloud TensorFlow if that’s not enough.

There are ways of detecting cheating.

Just like with chess, when AI engines got very strong a few years ago, people started using them to find superhuman moves and win games. Now OGS will tell you how similar your game's moves are to what a computer would have played. Even professionals don't get above something like 75-80%, but I've lost a dozen games to people getting 95%+ on that metric.

Yup, KGS is dying a slow death and was turned over to the American Go Association to be managed. KGS Plus is free now, which is a nice Plus, I suppose.

KGS is still going but still Java client only?

These days there are lots of great alternatives :

OGS, Fox, Tygem, Panda Net to name but a few.

All of them have their pros and cons but OGS is great for western players.

Also can highly recommend lifein19x19.com

Small correction: KGS is no longer Java-client-only. The protocol was opened up a few years ago and there are several web-based clients now, most notably https://shin.gokgs.com/

Also thank you for the lifein19x19.com shoutout :)

Would you mind giving examples of these much larger servers? Japanese, preferably...

For Japanese go server, I'd suggest IGS aka PandaNet.

It's hard to say how much larger it is than OGS. OGS has an enormous population of correspondence players but generally smaller for live play maybe by 3x?

I would also highly recommend PandaNet. They have some really tough players.

Man, this brings back memories. When I first learned I used the playgo.to[0] tutorials and then followed up to play at the "No Name Go Server" which had a consistent 20 people on at any one time. (Now it's completely gone). Sadly, there has been a rapid consolidation in the space - that server along with Yahoo, MSN games have been deprecated. Even KGS [1], once the largest English go server, has been losing players and is dying a slow death. I moved to WINGS and Dragon later, but it was always so-so.

Probably my favourite place to play now is either on Pandanet [2] or the online go server [3] but it isn't quite the same, and (for me) there isn't the same sense of community that I had, even on MSN games.

[0] http://playgo.to/index-e.html

[1] https://www.gokgs.com

[2] https://pandanet-igs.com/communities/pandanet

[3] https://online-go.com

KGS was a special place where I've spent many hours not just playing but also kibitzing the pros (and TheCaptain).

This doesn't really happen in the same way on the currently popular Go or Chess servers.

I am not sure whether its closed "Java Applet" form has been its strength, its downlfall or both but it does seem unmatched in its community.

Oh wow! I used to love TheCaptain and his wacky, aggressive style. Players like Carmel were always a pleasure to watch too (since I wasn't 6D+ myself).

I do think the Java Applet (which used to give virus warnings) and the fact that other go servers (like Tygem) had stronger/more exciting games caused the decline. Maybe splitting the userbase into "Rooms" was too much? I also think the move to their "Shin KGS" web player came too slowly and OGS ate Kiseido's lunch.

Captain the best

This takes me back. I lived on KGS for three years from when I learned to 2K.

Now it always feels like I'm rolling the dice if I can get the java app running on my Mac.

The problem for strong players on KGS is that it takes forever to find a match. That's why most strong players now play on Tygem (from SK) or Fox (from CN).

Pandanet (aka IGS) is Japan-based and they usually play Japanese style games. Tygem and Fox is where the most modern and aggressive Go is played. Pandanet is to Tygem/Fox what a formal duel among aristocrats is to a prison knife fight, or the difference between fighting a gentle martial arts sensei vs fighting an upset Mike Tyson.

KGS has now a web version, https://shin.gokgs.com/ It does not support registration, but once you are registered you can play there.

If you are a beginner, try the Color Go Server (CGS). https://www.colorgoserver.com/

CGS "enhances" Go by coloring the board, giving you a visual way to estimate your territory. It also can count liberties so you know how you are doing in a capture race or when a group is about to die.

It's a great way to build an intuition around the game. It came out just a couple of months ago.

If you want to practice puzzles, try https://blacktoplay.com/ or https://badukpop.com/

> The Dragon Go Server (DGS) is a place where you can play turn-based Go with other players from around the world. It functions more or less the same way as playing Go via email would, but the Dragon Go Server provides a graphical representation of the board and handles things such as time limits, scoring and ratings.

https://www.dragongoserver.net/faq.php?read=t&cat=48#Entry49

I remember first discovering the game of Go, after watching the AlphaGo Documentary [1]. I highly recommend it, will definitely be signing up for this, I usually play on mobile :)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXuK6gekU1Y

The Surrounding Game and the Alpha Go documentary on Netflix are well worth a watch.

Does anyone have recommendations for educational Go software, akin to the various quasi-gamified chess learning and training platforms emerging lately (PlayMagnus et al)? I'm not sure I have the mental bandwidth right now to work through books independently, but would love an app or other service I could spend a free minute or two on here and there.

I'm aware of Baduk Pop (https://badukpop.com/) but haven't tried it yet; there's also SmartGo (https://www.smartgo.com/) but it's Windows/iOS (with a MacOS version in the works) and I'm mainly using Linux and Android.

I use Leela with the Lizzie frontend [0]. Leela is just the "engine" and Lizzie, the gui, does make it shine. It does pretty well on my end with a budget GPU and midrange CPU. Strongly recommend playing against it and using it to analyze games.

[0] https://github.com/featurecat/lizzie/releases

The strongest open source engine right now is KataGo (https://github.com/lightvector/KataGo)

Many Faces of Go by David Fotland is good for learning but there are stronger opponent bots out there these days for playing against thanks to community efforts such as Leela Zero and KataGo.

However if you’re going to play a bot it helps if it’s sufficiently strong even if it doesn’t teach you, since you won’t end up copying it’s potentially questionable moves.

There's lots of sites hosting Go problems that rank you up into harder problems as you progress [1,2]; though mostly life and death type problems. Lately I've been seeing commentary on "The Conquest of Go" (never played it), which looks more like gamified full matches.

[1] blacktoplay.com [2] goproblems.com

This is not what I expected to see when I clicked the link

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