Thursday 13 February 2003

Pic of the day: In the animated TV series, Hikaru plays on an internet cafe where his friend's sister works. These days, I am sure most Japanese children have internet connection at home, just like us.

Go go panda egg!

Like pretty much everything, this started with something else. In this case, as I've briefly mentioned before, it started with the anime (Japanese cartoon) Hikaru no Go. (The name Hikaru is for some reason pronounced Ihskar-u or Shkar-u.) It's about this boy who finds a ghost in a Go board, and under the tutelage of the ghost he becomes a better and better Go player. It is a very inspiring series, showing how you can improve through both success and failure in equal measure, as long as you have the right attitude. Highly recommended, especially for young people.

Hikaru no Go was (perhaps still is) a long-running TV series in Japan, where Go is a highly esteemed public sport, more so than chess is here in the west. (Although the Korean players are depicted as being overall stronger than their Japanese counterpart.) Highly talented and dedicated children study Go and prepare for a career as professional Go players, often to the exclusion of an ordinary education and career. The risks of this are also poignantly illustrated in the series, which seems to be quite realistic except for the ghost of an imperial Go teacher from 1000 years ago.

In a series of episodes, we learned that you can play Go over the Internet against opponents from all over the world. This was actively used in the plot, as on Internet nobody can see that you are a ghost. But it also made me curious (and probably not only me). Through various byways I found what seems to be the main street of the Internet Go community, IGS (Internet Go Server) on http://igs.joyjoy.net. Joyjoy? I hope this is some kind of Japanese pun. The client program that lets you play on a virtual Go board is called Panda Egg. That's a pretty weird expression once you think about it, since Pandas are mammals. It probably makes perfect sense to the Japanese, though I suspect I will never understand.

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Anyway, the International Go server is a fairly old institution as far as the Net goes, dating back to the time before the fancy windows and mouse things and the World Wide Web. Actually it was started the same year as the WWW was launched – it says so on their web site: "Saving the Go Community since 1992." That's what it says ... saving. Engrish is a hard language, however.

Back then you could use a simple program called Telnet to connect to other machines (with their permission and within certain limits). You still can, and it is possible to play Go that way, against opponents from all over the world. However, there have been made several "clients", programs that translate the text commands to and from a windowed interface with pretty pictures. The Panda Egg is one such, and the official one for the site, although there is also a newer Java client, and most people seem to recommend another client, TgWin, that is sold as shareware. Being cheap and lazy, I opted for the free Panda Egg.

Panda Egg is certainly not the prettiest thing around. It is not 3D, it does not offer a choice of textures and animated moves. But it clearly depicts a wooden board and the round shapes serve well enough as white and black stones. To reduce the risk of wrong moves, you have to click on an intersection to highlight it and then click again to actually place your stone. That's basically what there is to it. Oh, and you can watch other people's games. Oh, and there is a chat window. The chat window is very primitive, printing several types of chat in the same window and using surrounding punctuation instead of color to tell them apart. Like if it says !Itlandm! then it's me using a shout, a broadcast message. There are other signs for private messages and for commenting on a game you are watching (in which case your message is seen only by those who watch the same match).

Anything more advanced, and you're back to a Telnet window. For instance to not show up in the list of players, I have to open the Telnet window and write "toggle open off". For the first day or two, I wondered why people kept calling me up and asking to play, even though I was watching a game. In the cartoon, Hikaru is advised to just click cancel on these requests, but I feel it would be better to not have people bother to try. I found a reference to "toggles" and gave the command "help toggle" in the telnet window. Sure enough, there are two toggles: One for being very interested in playing, and one for not being interested at all. So now I do this every time I go in to look at a game, because I have no idea whether the program stores my settings between sessions.

***

The server does however store your game statistics, if you play. You can set your own rank, but the server will judge you by how you play against others of known rank. If you insist on giving a higher rank than you can live up to, then you will have lots of defeats, and this shows up on your score card whenever someone considers you for a match. I am not sure whether the program eventually changes your rank as you improve in the game, or whether you have to do that yourself. I haven't improved in the game yet ... I am still a total newbie, and may well remain so till the day I die (may it still be far away!).

Still, watching other games is interesting. I particularly like to see when someone of high rank plays a teaching game against someone of low rank, giving them a handicap. I try to guess how the lower level player will respond, and more and more often this actually happens. Now in all honesty, I often have a somewhat fuzzy idea ("one of those 3 positions, where he will be able to block white's advance", or "try to break out of the formation before it is closed"). Still, it is kind of encouraging that I begin to think like a low-level player, as opposed to just staring dumbly at the screen, wondering what's going on...

Panda Egg (or perhaps it is the IGS server) has a nice feature for playing through games you observe. It stores the moves, so when you come into a running match, you can go back to the start and replay it move by move. (It does not store commentary comments from other observers though, but these are usually only used during the slower, high-level matches.)

OK, I admit this is all pretty useless unless you play Go or at least wish you could play Go. In which case you probably knew it all and more. But since I've spent some time on this lately, I thought it might interest you in some remote way. I mean, since you're reading this journal in the first place.