Category Archives: games

Return to Daggerfall

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Little known fact: If you save your game in Daggerfall and reload it, the trees will have moved. So will the people, and they will have new names. Both the forest and the villagers are randomly created anew each time you arrive. One thing is constant though: The women all have big butts.

In the last days of MS-DOS, just before Windows 95 changed everything, some of the greatest games ever were made. Developers used to floppy disks saw the rapid spread of hard disks and CD-ROM and suddenly found they had unlimited space to make the ultimate game. At the same time, the video cards of the time allowed easily recognizable pictures, but not the lifelike detail that soon came to fill our CD-ROMs and hard disks to the brim. And so, this era saw games of a scope never seen before or since, a scope so epic that it would take lifetimes to fully explore them.

Daggerfall is one such game. A single-player role playing game with an interface similar to the massive multiplayer RPGs which were just emerging, it contains terrain larger than Great Britain, although luckily you can also use the map to travel directly to any known location. The land is dotted with literally thousands of locations, from farms to cities, from small crypts to enormous dungeons which may take a full workday to explore. (Not that I recommend using your workday so!) Towns and cities have a range of shops from the traditional blacksmiths to clothes shops and even banks, where you can stash your heavy gold coins or borrow money and buy a local house or a ship.

Magic is an important force in Daggerfall, and the Mages Guild not only sell spells, members can also buy magical items or even make their own spells and magical items once they gain some rank in the guild. They may even get a specialist to teleport them to another part of the country in an instance, or summon a powerful demon which may know about ancient artifacts with unique powers. As an alternative to making your own magical gear, you may try visiting different guild chapters, as they have their own specialties. I am not sure how many there are of them, but probably in the hundreds.

Temples offer various services, such as healing and selling potions, and eventually making your own potions. (One of them specializes in magic items instead, for those who for some reason don’t join the mages guild.) In some provinces you may also join a knightly guild which will let its champions sleep for free in any inn or tavern in the province, or even give high-ranking members a local house for free. (You can, as mentioned, buy your own house, but they are rather pricey.) The Fighters’ guild has no such grand reward, but they let you sleep in the guild house and repair your gear for you.

Daggerfall was ahead of its time. Like other massive games from this time, such as the strategy game Master of Magic, it is partly remembered for its massive bugs, although most of these were patched later. A few features were put in the game but never activated (or perhaps they were deactivated), such as furniture shops and prostitutes. You never see the ships actually sail, either. The dozen or so different languages have very little effect in the game. Still, one must admire the ambition of such an epic undertaking. Even though the later Elder Scrolls games were also known to be incredibly massive, they pale compared to the scope of Daggerfall.

And almost 20 years later, it is still a truckload of fun to play. The graphics look horrible for a few minutes until the imagination kicks in, the blocky sprites smooth out, and you start to see the land the way the developers imagined it, an immense world filled with wonder and danger, where you are left alone to create your own fate. Good, bad, you’re the one with the sword … or the magic … or the ability to speak with centaurs and nymphs. An endless adventure has just begun.

Go or no Go?

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“Only the body is shed; the mind is forever in the maze of 19 lines.” 

I saw this illustration near the end of the Hikaru no Go manga. It creeped me out, and I think I had reason for that.

I have written occasionally about the relevance of lower worlds – the worlds which we humans create – to the human soul. Back in the 1990es, one of my fellow ardent Daggerfall players pondered whether we might go to Daggerfall when we die. That was both a creepy and alluring prospect in a certain sense: Daggerfall was a truly life-size game, the like of which has perhaps never been seen (although the graphics are less than amazing by today’s standards). As experienced from 1st person perspective, the size of the terrain was around the size of Great Britain – more than enough to live countless lifetimes and yet not stumble across everything. It was a world rich in magic and with varied weaponry, but also ordinary clothes, houses, bookstores, even banks. It seemed reasonable, entirely too reasonable, that a game such as that could trap a human spirit.

I have mentioned the Orthodox philosopher Philip Sherrard and his conviction that the human soul, upon death, brings with it its internal representation of the world. Indeed, it is this internal image of the world which the soul lives in even while alive, although while we live it may be updated frequently through our senses. Once we die, this connection is broken, but the vast internal model of the world remains with us and the soul continues to inhabit it. As such, it seems reasonable to assume that the dead may not even know they are dead, even if they remain conscious in some non-physical medium.

Ryuho Okawa, founder of the Japanese new religion Happy Science, likewise think that dead humans without spiritual experience will quickly forget that they are dead. The Astral Realm, where such souls live, is similar to the physical world. I don’t think Okawa and Sherrard knew of each other – they don’t have much more in common – so I assume this is some tradition that has been around for a while.

It is in light of this that I see the words of today’s picture and imagine the hapless soul trapped in the Go board, unaware that its life on Earth has come to an end, endlessly searching for the Hand of God in the maze of 19×19 lines. I wonder if even Daggerfall, with its night terrors, would not be preferable to such a maze. And yet it is not really a very confined space: The number of different games that can be played on a grown-up’s goban (Go board) far exceeds the number of stars in the observable universe.

Using my imagination, I traveled to an alternate timeline in which I had started studying Go seriously in early 2010, some two and a half year ago. Spending hours each day learning the game, very little would happen at first. For months, I would just routinely lose to the artificial intelligences, being too incompetent to dare challenge a human player. I would however continue to study the newbie advice available on the Net, and eventually beginner books, while trying various tactics against the computer. Gradually I would get drawn into it, until – as has happened with various other activities – I started seeing the game movements with a kind of “third eye” superimposed on the world around me, kind of like you may imagine having glasses that project an image on top of reality. This is the point at which my learning a skill increases dramatically.

Seeing myself today in that alternate timeline, I can’t say I like what I saw. Go is certainly preferable in many ways to the games I tend to play. It disciplines the mind and strengthens the brain, it encourages clear thinking and a deep understanding of cause and effect deployed deep into future time. It is an extremely chaste game, well it is really beyond that concept whatsoever. It is a great way to meet people with a tendency to think. Yes, there is much good to say about it, but nothing good to say about being obsessed with it. For the more you immerse yourself in it, as in any game or sport or even job, the greater is the risk that your mind is trapped forever in a limited corner of existence.

So the answer to my question on top there? Go or no Go? “Neither of the above.” There is no lower world that should be allowed to trap our soul, not even one as pure as the world of Go.

Skyrim revisited

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Greetings from Norway… er, Skyrim! Almost the same thing. Here featuring Cerviden the supposed healer.

New computer, new modifications, bad habits.

I had barely touched Skyrim since last year, but three days ago I got the urge to try it on the laptop. I did not expect it to run very well there, it being a laptop and all. (Although I have hooked up a 24″ monitor, USB keyboard and trackball to it in my home office.) But it runs smooth as butter in high resolution. This computer really is something. (Asus N56V.)

I was trying out a couple new mods. Well, one of them was also around last time, in a certain sense: Calientes female body mod, Big Bottom Edition arrived almost as soon as the game did, rendering female bodies looking actually female rather than male bodies with oranges on the chest. But at the time it had the side effect of leaving all females naked if taking off their armor. Now they have underwear (if you insist during installation), and not particularly sexy underwear either, so that is good I guess. I routinely press the “take all” button after defeating enemies. (I use the word “defeat” rather than “kill”, because they certainly don’t seem to be dead in the earthly sense. There are no wounds or burns, and they don’t get rigor mortis. Even if you leave them around for a couple days, they don’t discolor or bloat, and after a couple days, they just disappear while you are not watching. So it seems more similar to City of Heroes where you get fixed up at the hospital at a modest cost if you are defeated. Or that’s what I tell myself.)

A mod I have not seen before is Cerviden – SMART Healer – which is a follower who can be instructed in how to fight, or not. Well, that is the theory. I tell her to stay back, not attack unless attacked, and not use aggressive magic, just cast healing and protecting spells on me as needed. She is all OK with that, but once the battle begins, she forgets and starts attacking the enemies from a distance. This keeps me from trapping their life energies in my crystals, not to mention gaining experience in weapon and armor use. Oh well. She is an amusing companion though, with a lot of voice acted more or less context-sensitive chatter. Probably the funniest companion I have had since the sentient sword in Morrowind. That was a hoot.

I also have downloaded the fairly large Immersive Armors mod, which adds a lot of new armor types to the world. Since many of them are context or level dependent, I have not seen most of them yet.

A quality world map with roads drawn on it makes travel easier. It is a small thing but makes a noticeable difference to “quality of life” in the game.

Finally there is the Guard Dialogue Overhaul, which is meant to make the guards less dumb and more respectful. They now recognize my fame, such as it is, and treat me accordingly. So that is something.

There sure are some amazingly high quality game modifications available for free. As I have said before, the freeconomy is already upon us. (Although some artists accept donations.) As for me, I hope I am not going to use their creations much. I am not particularly proud of having played Skyrim again. The voice in my heart is not impressed either. Stabbing people repeatedly with daggers is a bad habit. And you wouldn’t want to have people in underwear strewn around when angels come to visit, either. Besides, it takes time that I had intended to use for other things.

Still, it is amazing to live in the future. To think that one can visit such a detailed, lifelike imaginary world in one’s own living room! I remember the time when a screen resolution of 320×240 caused my computer to almost overheat. If it gets better than this, I better not enter in the first place, or I might never come back. That would be a great loss, at least to me!

City of Heroes closing down

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Well, at least it seems America will outlive its (original and best) superhero game.

I logged on to Virtue, my favorite server on City of Heroes, for a little superheroing. It has been a couple weeks since last time, I guess. There were a bunch of people outside the City Hall in Atlas, where I usually log out. They seemed to be protesting something?

They were, it turned out, protesting the closure of the game, which is due for November. I had not heard anything about that. That was certainly unexpected: There were recently released a couple new power sets, and the number of users has been fairly stable for a while now. But evidently NCSoft is restructuring to focus on their [buzzword], which presumably means Korea, so Paragon Studies in America got the ax. I can see a certain logic in that. America is in decline. In a few years, it will join the Soviet Union and the British Empire as fond memories of a glorious past, I expect. Owning such an arch-typical American game will be a liability for an Oriental corporation in the new Asian dawn.

Still, it would be kind of nice if they could sell it instead. It is probably a bit late for that now, though. Customers will start drifting away. Well, after they finish today’s great rally on Virtue. There were 33 instances of Atlas Park when I left, filled with protesters holding signs or torches. Thousands of people making one last try to change the mind of people half way around the world. Good luck with that.

Perhaps I should log on some of my favorite characters and take some final screenshots before it is over? The game had great graphics and was one of my favorites for screenshots from before it even opened. Yes, I played from the closed beta onward. But it so happens that I have begun to play it less and less over the last two years or so. Not because of the game, which has grown steadily better. It is truly awesome by now. But I spend less time gaming now, I guess. Well, except for Go, currently, but I will probably give up that pretty soon. Anyway, that part of my life was slowly fading away already. So it is kind of convenient for me that this is when it ends. Still, it is a shame. It was a great idea and well executed. There is nothing quite like it. I doubt I am going to play any MMORPGs again after this one. Certainly not any from NCSoft.

The Go Teaching Ladder

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“People only learn from mistakes when they are hurt by them” says Fujivara no Sai. I disagree. At the Go Teaching Ladder, you can learn from other people’s mistakes. In contrast, I don’t seem to learn from my own, even when they hurt – at least in Go.

A place where Go players can learn and teach at their leisure.

During my current Go (igo) fad, I have made my way to the Go Teaching Ladder. It is a website and database based on a simple but great idea: People can get their matches reviewed by someone who is more skillful than themselves, while also reviewing the matches of those ranked lower than themselves. For instance, if you are a 10-kyu player, you could review the game of a 20-kyu gamer and have your own latest match reviewed by a 1-kyu player.  (Actually the difference from 10 to 1 is greater than from 20 to 10, I would say. Progress is easier at the bottom. Well, once you get started, I guess. I still can’t seem to get it.)

By using this system, only the ones at the bottom are only receiving, and only those at the very top are only giving. And even that is not exactly true. You see, not only is it a well known fact that teaching makes your own understanding more solid. In the case of Go, there is also the element that Go is not a single skill. Some players are strong in the mid-game, others in the endgame. Some play logically, calculating possible future moves; others are intuitive, reacting to the shapes and patterns formed by the stones on the board. Some play more aggressively, others more defensively. Some rely on remembering a vast library of standard responses, while others prefer to think for themselves with every move they make. Because of this and more, you can be better than a player at nine moves in a row, and then the tenth amazes you with its brilliance. So reviewing someone moderately below you can still give you a bunch of new ideas.

Best of all, the reviewed games are stored in an archive for anyone to download and watch. It uses the .SGF format, which can be used by a number of programs to play back the moves on a visual Go board on the screen, with comments on the side and pointers on the board and alternative play sequences shown. The standard program from Pandanet, GoPanda, can also load these files. (The same format is used when you want to look back over your old games that you have played on the IGS.) GoPanda is written in Java so it probably runs on several non-Windows computers as well.

I have downloaded a few games, mainly such where a low-level match was reviewed by a high-level player. I was hoping that some of the mistakes were similar to mine and some of the advice was relevant to me. Wouldn’t that be nice. So I read a couple reviews, got a number of great ideas, and fired up a new game on my Galaxy Tab, still on the easiest level. It crushed me just as easily as before. Not only am I unable to learn from my mistakes, it seems I am unable to learn from other people’s mistakes as well, even when they are thoroughly documented and an alternative approach is spelled out. I must have lost close to a dozen games by now!

A dozen games? What happened to the 20 000 games I was suppose to lose, getting butthurt every time? Well, that was to become a master player. I am just saying, it should be possible to see or feel some progress after spending hours each day for several days studying Go. Perhaps I have an anti-talent, perhaps I am immune to Go somehow. I saw this guy at the Internet Go Server just recently, who had won 2100 games and lost 2400. He was 17-kyu (the lowest that is recognized on IGS) and struggling against someone in the beginner class (everything below 17k, basically). So after playing over 4500 games, he was still clinging to the bottom like a sea star. That is kind of sad. I wonder if that was someone who started playing Go in his later years as well? Or someone with an anti-talent, like me?

But for everyone else, the Go Teaching Ladder seems like a great resource.

Butt, meet ice

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“Since I was small I have played hours of Go everyday, no matter how painful, I played Go.” Why would anyone play painful games? Why do people get butthurt several times a day, year out and year in?

Geoff Colvin, in his book Talent is Overrated, has calculated that before you become an Olympic figure-skater, you will have fallen on your butt on the cold hard ice at least 20 000 times, probably much more. No matter how talented you are, there are things the human body can only gradually be shaped into doing, through relentless effort day after day, month after month, for years. I hope those skaters have some kind of pillow on their butt the first 10 000 times at least, because there sure isn’t much protection when they actually perform.

No, I have not suddenly taken an interest in figure skating. I have suddenly taken an interest in the ancient board game of Go, and could not help but compare my situation. I have been reading several tutorials, watched numerous live games at different levels, read up on strategies and solved problems. And when I play against my Galaxy Tab at the easiest level, it cuts me to pieces. I once managed to secure about a third of the board by defending tightly, but it took the rest. If I try for more, it slices me to pieces. That hurts.

I used to always be the smartest guy in my class. Once I moved away from my second cousins, I used to be the smartest student in my class. From high school onward, I used to at least sometimes be the smartest person in my class, teacher included. I was somewhere between the smartest of a hundred and the smartest of a thousand, back in the days. I have not got Alzheimer’s yet, and not slipped on a banana peel and hit my head. The younger generation has crept up on me, that is true; they are smarter than mine was. But I am still not stupid, I like to think. And then this happens. Over and over again. I just can’t learn Go, it seems. Even if I read it from different angles and think I understand it, the moment white invades my territory, I have no idea what to do next. Or if I have, it does not work. My butt meets the cold, hard ice of reality and it hurts.

As I implied in my recent entry about GURPS and real life, I am used to following this principle: “If at first you don’t succeed, try something else; there are lots of things you’ll succeed at right away.” That’s how I’ve lived my life, for the most part. I am used to picking up things easily. It worked before. But this time, I try again – and I still don’t get it. I hope this is not how my life is going to be from now on out. I feel like an ordinary human. It is not a good feeling. Ordinary humans have my sympathy. An abstract and remote sympathy, for the most part. Until now, at least.

Now I wonder: If I try, try, try again – if I do my best and still lose 20 000 times – will I really become a master? Or is talent underrated, and you either got it or not? Am I simply too old? One thing is pretty sure: By the time I have lost 20 000 times, the processing power of the average Android tablet will have risen tenfold. So there is a pretty good chance I’ll still be limping off the scene rubbing my hurting butt, ten years from now.

Or I could do something more meaningful, I guess. If at first you don’t succeed, ask yourself whether it is really worth it…

Go (igo) and religion

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“Even now I am in front of a Go board” thinks the 1000 year old ghost Sai from Hikaru no Go. “But for how long will God continue to listen to my selfishness?” The answer to that is a major spoiler for the story, but here’s a hint: Perhaps humans, like the stones on the Go board, are placed where they are for a purpose beyond themselves.

The ancient board game of Go may have some things in common with the great world religions. Is it a coincidence?

I hope that the recent revival of the ancient board game of Go (or igo, in Japanese) will also lead to a flowering of religion, specifically good religion. I generally think highly of religion, as promoting virtue and wisdom. But there is also bad religion, this cannot be denied: It promotes anger, pride and discord. I like to think that the game of Go, despite being a war game in principle, has qualities that encourage virtue and wisdom, and aligns with higher religion. I may be wrong about this, so let us think about it together.

It is clear from observation that Go encourages patience and self-control. We tend to think of young people as being volatile, given to quick bursts in one direction or the other, flittering and fluttering like butterflies from one idea to the next. But young people who play Go are able to sustain concentration for steadily longer periods of time, and suppress rash moves in order to reach a goal that is ahead in time. This is wise and virtuous, and any activity that promotes it should be given due credit.

An interesting difference between Go and chess is that chess is feudal: The pawns are inherently less worth than knights and bishops, from the very start. In contrast, all stones in Go are equal at the start, and equal at the end when they go back in the same box. It is only through their position on the board and the influence of being at the right time and place, that they derive their value. This is a way of looking at humans that is also aligned with virtue and wisdom. We are all born as babies, and it is through being at the right place at the right time doing the right thing that we become valuable in the greater picture. Someone who may seem insignificant at the moment may become very important at a future time.

To take one example, the religion of Christianity started in a barn and continued with a dead man on a stake, basically. It could hardly be less auspicious, a sight that would make most stomachs churn. But within a few decades, it was bringing light and hope to many nations. As for the Buddha, he was born a king but became a pawn, wandering off into the forest to leave all earthly ambitions behind. Yet his wisdom has lifted nations up over the ages to come. Lao-Tzu is said to have been riding out of the empire on a yak when he wrote the book of the Tao. He seemed destined to be forgotten, but a border guard convinced him to write briefly the wisdom of his long life. Even though what we do may seem insignificant, if it is part of a higher plan, it may turn things around long after our passing.There is no telling which small and forgettable person may end up being a hub on which fate turns. Nor can we tell at a glance who is winning and who is losing. The play of a greater hand may change one into the other.

A perhaps more double-edged effect of Go: Everything on the board must be assumed to be meaningful, to have a purpose, if only you could see it. Unless you are playing against a small child or a madman, there is not a stone on the board that isn’t there for a purpose.

The world we see around us can be said to consist of “law and coincidence”, or order and randomness. There are clearly laws of nature that keep the great things on path: The sun rises and sets, the moon waxes and wanes reliably. But there are also things that seem utterly unpredictable. This mixing of order and randomness goes very deep: If we have a sample of radioactive Actinium-225, we know that it will be reduced to half by exactly 10 days. But if we observe the individual atoms, there is no possibility to predict when they will decay. We know that half of them will be gone, but any one of them might linger for months, or disappear within seconds. There is no way they can agree among themselves who will change: They are atoms, they cannot communicate and have neither wit nor will.

On the goban (Go board), there is no randomness. Yet if you come by two strangers playing, at first glance it may look random indeed. (Although I am told that this is less so to an expert.) So the practice of playing Go encourages the thinking that all things have a meaning, a purpose. Religion is known to confer a similar experience. But is this really true?

There is such a thing as superstition. For instance, a black cat crosses the road and later that day you become virulently ill. There is a saying that bad fortune follows when a black cat crosses the road, so you may think this is the reason, or if not the reason then at least a portent or warning of something that would happen anyway. But neither science nor high religion supports this form of thinking. A lot of things happen that have no meaning in themselves.

But like the stones on the Go board, these things may have a meaning from outside themselves, because they are placed there by a higher hand. This is what religion teaches. But this requires belief in a God or Karma or some such higher power that controls all that seems to be random. That is quite a leap of faith! This aspect of religion is, and should be, voluntary. I am not going to try to convince you. As Jesus Christ once said: “If they don’t believe Moses and the prophets, they will not believe if someone rises from the dead.” Indeed, one of the last things any of his disciples said to him before his suffering in Gethsemane and on Calvary was: “Show us the Father, and it will be enough for us.” But of course Jesus could not show them the eternal, omnipresent God. He could only show himself. In the end, that was enough for 11 of the 12 who were with him. But not for all. No matter what we say or do, it will never be enough for all. This is how the universe was intended to work, allowing free will. This is what I believe.

So what I say is that the habits from playing Go may make it easier to think in the same way as higher religions do. Whether you think that is a good thing or not, I have no control over that. Nor do I see it as favoring one religion over another, really, although I suppose someone else may see that. And if you can derive wisdom and virtue from it without religion – which I am sure is possible as well – this is in itself a good thing, surely. These are scarce resources at any time.

But at least I can see more clearly now why so many elderly Japanese spend their final years playing Go. Perhaps it would be even better if they had started early, as many young people have done since the 1990es. Let us see what will be the final outcome of that.

Fun with Pandanet

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“I could disguise myself and play…” Hikaru thinking of some way to play without anyone knowing his real name and age (he was just starting 7th grade so people would be excited if they saw him winning at Go all the time). Luckily he discovered the Internet, where nobody can see that you are a dog. Or a boy who gets advice from a 1000 year old ghost.

Since I am not doing anything impressive anyway, I may as well tell you the truth. I have been spending some time lately on Pandanet and the associated IGS – Internet Go Server.

The Internet Go Server is a surprisingly entertaining place, but I am not good at explaining it.

The place is still very much like it was in the anime Hikaru no Go, “a wild and woolly place where pros amuse themselves under assumed names, top Asian matches are mirrored in real time, and there’s always something exciting going on”, as the American Go Association puts it. Actually it is not entirely lawless: You have to register under a name and verify it by email to be allowed to play, although guests can (and do) watch. I registered my nick (Itlandm) after one of my earlier re-watches of Hikaru no Go, possibly even the first time.

The web site has news related to the server and official events being played there. It also has answers to frequently asked questions, and a section that teaches the basics of Go / igo from scratch. It is detailed, friendly and quite likely the best introduction to Go that I have seen. It teaches an intuitive approach: “Don’t you get the feeling that black controls a larger territory now?”  The concept of territory is central to this particular approach, taking the game back to its roots as the ultimate strategy game as a birds-eye view of a battlefield. The website aims to teach you enough Go (or igo, as it is commonly called in Japan) to start playing after ten “days” of lessons. There are only 5 rules in Go, so you’d think you could just jump right in, but you will feel a lot more confident once you learn basics like how to count territory and how to make shapes that cannot be destroyed. By the end of the course, you should be able to play the IGS robots, and then other players.

***

The ladder of kyu and dan: The heart of Pandanet – IGS is the server where you can play ranked games against others from all over the world. I am not sure how the ranking was established originally, probably with the help of experts. In real life, professional Go players need to play matches against those on the next level above them in order to gain a rank. The professional levels are called “dan”, and the amateur levels are called “kyu”. In practice, many amateurs these days are strong enough to play at the lower dan levels, but once you get to 5-dan and above, there are only a few players on IGS and people tend to follow their matches closely. I saw a 9-dan player once, but he was just watching. In real life, a 9-dan professional could make a pretty good living from his skills.

On the Internet Go Servers the ranking is done differently these days. (I base this on the website, since I am not playing yet, just watching.) By default all matches in the main hall are ranked, even if you play 3 levels above or below your level. Games are considered equal if you play with the proper handicap (a combination of extra territory points and extra starting stones for the weaker player). If you win an even game, you gain 100 points. If you lose, you lose 100 points. But if you play a stronger or weaker player without handicap, the points vary based on the level difference. If you play against a stronger player, you get more points for a win but lose less points for a loss. The other way around if you play against a weaker player.

It is the sum of these points that decide what rank you are, or in other words your strength at Go. The line for increasing one level or half-level is higher than for decreasing, so you won’t keep changing levels up and down several times a day merely by winning and losing every other time. You need to consistently play better to gain a higher level.

The rank numbers are a bit strange in Go. The highest kyu level is 1, and there is no limit to how bad you can be (although as mentioned, the IGS stops at 17 now). But with dan (the system used by professionals) you start at 1 and in practice stops at 9. On the IGS, 10 dan is the maximum, but I have only seen that one 9-dan player so far. (Even though the names are the same, the actual professional dan levels are separate from the rating used on the Net and amateur tournaments. They should be vaguely comparable, over time. In practice, pro levels are noticeably higher, since it takes far longer to rise in the formal hierarchy of professional play. Even if you were a 7 dan amateur, you have to start as a 1 dan pro.)

If you know your strength from elsewhere, you can start with a provisory level. That way you won’t have to play hundreds of games to reach your correct level, and it is also more fair to those who play you. Otherwise a lot of people will lose points playing against what seems to be an equal player, but who is actually much stronger. Of course, if you are bluffing, it will become obvious pretty soon. But I just saw a provisory 6-dan, and he has a healthy ratio of wins, so that saved a lot of irritation for other people. Conversely, I saw another player who had several hundred more wins than losses. Either he has improved greatly from he started, or left a trailed of devastated opponents.)

Of course, if I ever get good enough to play against humans at all, I will have to start at the Beginner Class, which is below even 17 kyu.  Games here are not rated. But before even that there is a room where you can play against robots. I wonder if I will ever get beyond that. My Galaxy Tab beats me handily at its easiest level, so it does not look good for my future as a Go player! Perhaps that is a good thing, all things considered…

Life and death and Go

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 “I can learn how to control my emotions!?” Judging from your expression of shock and disbelief, I’d say you still have a way to go! But yeah, it is considered one of the virtues of Go, the ancient Oriental board game.

Should I study the life and death of stones or humans? Both?

No, not yet my death or even anyone in my family, although I am sure we are not immortal yet. Rather, I have finished re-watching the inspirational anime Hikaru no Go, about a young boy and an old ghost stirring up the world of Go (or igo, as it is commonly called in Japan), the ancient board game which holds an even greater reputation than chess in Japan, Korea and China. It is seen as not only a game, but a cultural activity, and fitting for people who have retired and want to spend their last year in a dignified way.

This, dear reader, is my problem with it. I don’t want to spend my last days or years on Earth playing a game; I want to spend them preparing for the hereafter: Studying esoteric books, reflecting on myself, meditating, praying and conveying my accumulated wisdom to the public domain in my journal.

That is what I tell myself. But actually observing myself, I see that I easily spend an hour or two a day playing computer games, more during the weekend. Add another hour watching family-friendly anime, and I have enough time to become a decent amateur at Go/igo. I may no longer be in the uppermost percentile of IQ, but it is not because I have fallen and hit my head; rather, the younger generation has closed in on me, being noticeably smarter than the kids I went to school with. Perhaps it is because they have grown up in front of the computer, while my classmates spent their free time outdoors chasing a ball. If we had  played Go instead, we geezers would still rule the roost… ^_^

So it is not that my brain can’t learn anything new. Rather, I have this mental block, similar to Hikaru in most of the episodes from 60 to 70, thinking that if he played Go ever again and liked it, something terrible would happen: The spirit that had accompanied him day and night for the last years would disappear forever. That is a pretty dramatic threat, I can assure you, because I cannot imagine what I would do if the Spirit were to suddenly disappear and not come back. I would be in Hell. So the question is rather whether I, like Hikaru, have misunderstood the spiritual value of Go.

In a way, I think Go would be preferably to Master of Magic. Go is after all a two-player game, so I would please someone else in addition to myself. (Of course, we don’t want to stretch that particular phrasing too far…) But basically, it is less selfish than many – most? – of my free time activities. On the other hand, having a more reputable hobby would make it easier to justify as good and right, rather than accept it as a sign of human frailty which I am slowly working to eradicate. I worry that it may become a part of my soul. They don’t play Go in Heaven, do they?

So I’m kind of compromising. I am reading “how to play Go” pages on the Internet, and watching low-level games on the International Go Server. But I am not playing there. Yet. Instead I am solving Go problems of life and death. This is an actual phrase in the culture of Go: It is essentially a war game, only simplified to the purest essence (far more so than chess), so groups of stones are said to have life if they have escape routes (liberties) or are connected with other stones of the same side which have such. Otherwise, the stones are said to have “died”. Studying life and death of stones is an essential activity for the beginner. But it is hard for me to do without thinking of life and death in Real Life.

Go (igo) on Android

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One of these two players is an idiot at playing Go. And it is not the tablet. -_-;

It has been a long time since last I wrote about the Oriental board game of Go. The game is deceptively simple. It takes two minutes to learn and a lifetime to master. Since more and more of those lifetimes are spent on the move, it makes sense to have the game available on your mobile phone or tablet. With the Android operating system becoming more and more widespread, several high-quality Go programs have become available for it.

There are basically three types of Go program for Android. One type lets two players use the same mobile phone or tablet to play the game against each other. Basically the device is used as a Go board (Goban in Japanese). Since I don’t know any local players, I have not downloaded this type of program.

The second type lets you play against your cell phone or tablet. These processors are less powerful than desktop or laptop computers, so they will not provide a challenge to the experienced player. I am not an experienced player, so I downloaded one of these. It is called Godroid. This is probably a pun, there’s nothing godlike about this program. Well, not by today’s standards. I suppose it is indistinguishable from magic. But that’s business as usual for today’s telecommunication devices. Using it is simple: You tap on the board where you want to play your stone, and a shadow of the stone appears. Tap once more to confirm. The device will play next. The first time I started, it directly opened a training game rather than taking me to the New game dialog where you can set board size, handicap, black or white, strength, komi and scoring. This made me think initially that these options did not exist, but when I started a new game, they did.

The computer is a computer, obviously, so it will surely become predictable once you have played long enough. But with ten different levels of strength, this should take some time.

Godroid is just one of several programs, but it is free and has built-in artificial intelligence rather than running a separate program in the background as your opponent.

The ultimate challenge (for the time being at least) is another human player. Luckily this is also possible on your phone or tablet! Panda Tetsuki is a fast, clean and simple program to connect to the “PandaNet” IGS (International Go Server), which is what you would expect, a place where you can play Go against people from around the world, day and night. It also has limited chat / comment capabilities. You can connect as a guest right away, but if you have an account (as I have from my home computer), you can use that to log in as yourself. You need an account to participate in games, but you can watch games even as a guest. If you want to play, I recommend you first go into the menu and set “confirm moves”, so you don’t accidentally place your stone in the wrong place and ruin the game for yourself and your opponent.

The functionality is simple: Players who are online are sorted by strength. Your name is highlighted in blue. Players available for play are listed in black, unavailable in gray, and a symbol of a tiny Goban shows those who are playing a game. By clicking one of these you can watch their game. Click on the small arrow to the right (not very obvious!) to get the game board up and watch them play in real time! You can also wind the game backward and forward to catch up to what has happened before, use the phone’s menu button to get the option to jump to the start. I’d expected that to be in the action line with the back and forward keys, but I guess that would be a bit crowded?

There are less options than in the official client for the PC, but you can watch games, chat and look at statistics. And once you have an account, you can play against other registered players. As far as I know, it is still free to register. The ranking system on the IGS is based on your games, at least unless you are a verified pro, in which case you are marked as such. By consistently winning against players of higher rank, you will eventually move into that rank. Correspondingly if you consistently lose against a lower rank, you will fall into that rank. This assures that other players can easily choose you as a suitable opponent. It is possible to challenge someone of a distant rank. A higher player may play a teaching game. There is however no provision for a strong player to play against several weak players simultaneously, as far as I can see.

I apologize for not having more detail and for not having tested more programs. But since I have complained in the past about the lack of such programs, at least I can now eat my words. They are tasty. ^_^ By that I mean that I am glad to see there are now several good programs available for Android. Perhaps one day I will watch one of your games on the IGS?

***

This entry is actually closely related to the last few ones. Back when I read (and wrote) about deliberate practice, one of the things that occurred to me was the Oriental ancient board game of Go.

I know I have written about this a couple of times over the years, but there is a 75 episodes anime called “Hikaru no Go” about a boy learning this game and his deliberate practice to become one of the best players in the country. It is a very inspiring series, especially for those interesting in that particular game, but also more generally inspiring towards deliberate practice. The essential message is that you can learn both from loss and victory, but this requires that you always challenge yourself, that you always try something that is beyond what you should be capable of.

In other words, you should always seek out challenges where you have a small but nonzero chance of winning, and then seriously try to win. You should try so hard that there is a chance you might start crying if you lose. But whether you win or lose, you’re going to learn something. In fact, you are going to learn a lot if you practice that way. This is the fastest path to progress.

But thinking about this in my current life phase, I realized that there is nothing on Earth that I feel so passionately about, except possibly life itself. If I were to look at my life with those eyes, as a challenge which I have a small chance of not losing – the loss of this lifetime, this incarnation as Easterners would say, the loss of my soul as the Bible would put it – that would be the one thing that I would be sure to cry over. Thus my recent reflections on Gnosis (which, incidentally, is not related to Gnosticism except linguistically.)

But I cannot maintain such a high perspective for long, because I suck at being serious (except if I am sick and rapid getting sicker, at which time I tend to be super serious, imagine that! But that is not the case now, and I appreciate that.) So instead I have been watching this anime and downloading Go programs for Android.