There's an application called Go Free on the app store, and recently it's been upgraded to 3 dan.

So I thought, I'm 6kyu so I should take nine stones, right?

And so, feeling adventurous I only took 3 stones.

Had to quit halfway through the game because I was clearly winning.

So I wrote a letter to the developer and said that it plays on the 4 kyu level.

This is what they sent back:

" Developer response:
The program has received a formal rating from CGOS from over 2000 games, which allows us to derive a reliable 3 Dan rating for an Android phone (see http://www.yss-aya.com/cgos/19x19/bayes.html) "

Can somebody else try this program? I'm just curious who is right and who is wrong here. What's going on?..

Ratings/Rankings aren't real. They are only relative. They can relate only to those opponents around them. And that list is a purely self-contained list of computer opponents. So maybe its level is 3 dan when compared to its other opponents. This is how rank inflation happens. But to have any sort of real world relevance, all those bots needs to also be paired up with humans who have well established ranks. That sort of rank anchoring will help prevent rank inflation and give a more realistic value to their true strength. Otherwise, that list is practically meaningless.

I have the free version (can't play 19x19), and have not updated in a while (version 1.17). Its not very strong.

I'm updating to version 4.4 now

Free version allows 180 moves on 19x19, then the game is halted.

It is not even close to 3d. I just tried a h3 game against the free version. A 3d player should beat me comfortably. Here is the position after only 70 moves or so. The AI already gave away all its lead. It's no more than 1d. Not to mention it plays extremely slowly.

d.k. effect, perhaps.

I've got the full version and set it up against Zen 5 on the 5-dan setting. Some claim Zen is stronger when set to a fixed thinking time interval (which I might try at some point), but I thought that would provide a good base line.

Zen moved slightly quicker on some occasions than Go+, but then again my desktop is a i7-4790k with 16 GB RAM and my Android tablet just a 2.2 GHz quadcore Atom with 4 GB of RAM.


Go+ won by resignation.