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Comment by 613style | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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