Ruinatio Go

[FirstFifty]

I said this was a “time-waster” in my introductory sentence.

1st50, I hope you can create something as popular as Zuma or Angry Birds and which introduces people to Go -- that'd be fantastic.

I’m inclined to believe that such a game is just waiting to be made… although the odds of success are kind of abysmal. But everyone needs a hobby.

[jts]

The program generates a capturing race puzzle, the player picks a color, then plays it out against the AI. The board configurations are unnatural looking.

If I understand what you're saying, then this approach won't work. Or, at least, it won't work the way I think it should! If the program generates the puzzle randomly and lets the player choose the puzzle, then you need to be assuming that the puzzles are always equally hard for both sides, and the bot is always just slightly dumber than the human.

First of all, playing a random capturing race against an extremely dumb bot isn't going to reveal any of the subtlety of go, right? Second, there's no way to fine-tune the AI such that the rate of progress is going to increase at the exact same rate that the person doing the puzzles improves. What you really want, I think, is to figure out a sequence of puzzles - always biased in favor of Black - that a beginner can start out with and find the first one extremely intuitive, even simplistic, but find the final ones nearly impossible. You could design the puzzles by hand and have just a few possible sequences (this would, I think, be easiest) or you could come up with the basic principles that make capturing races easier and harder and have the program generate random puzzles that embody some mix of principles that generate more and less complex races that are more or less tilted in favor of Black (depending on how far the player has advanced). Then let Fuego take White and watch the sparks fly.

[Amelia]

I think what jts says would be great. It means that someone would first just have to find out about filling outside liberties first, then next level find out about approach moves, at the harder level throw-ins would be necessary, or the puzzles could get more intricated involving more groups sharing liberties.

It doesn't sound like something easy to make, but if you manage the progression right I'm sure it would work.

[TheBigH]

Is there a way to get it to work for Linux users?

The short answer is “not yet.” The long answer is “it’s possible now, but probably more trouble than it’s worth.” In theory, you could run a windows compatibility program such as Wine, install the windows version of a browser and run it under Wine, make sure you have the UNITY plug-in for it, and follow the link to my program. I haven’t tried this myself.

What a shame. I probably won't bother with all of that.

[FirstFifty]

On the subject of capturing race puzzles:
I’m confused. I first thought jts was talking about something a little bit like tsumego. But now it’s sounding exactly like tsumego. And there seems to be quite a lot of tsumego-related software available already. Is there some neglected niche? I feel I may be missing the point.

I’ll try to explain what I’m doing with capturing race puzzles a little better. A puzzle starts with black and white stones on the board, black to move. For black to win, she must prevent white from making life anywhere on the board. The puzzles have a hardness index associated with them that reflects how difficult it’s likely to be for black to succeed. The puzzles are generated while the player waits, so there isn’t a lot of time for the program to create a board configuration and make sure it has the right level of difficulty. The puzzles have different levels of hardness but are only intended to be challenging for a beginner, or for someone dodging distractions and racing against time.

A variation involves puzzles where it’s hard to tell (in the fraction of a second the program has available) whether black has a chance at all. In these cases, picking the color is the biggest part of solving the puzzle.

There are 2 different AI’s the players play against. One is a quick and dumb, pattern and heuristics bot, the other is a full-blown MCTS engine. Each seems to work best in different contexts.

[FirstFifty]

Is there a way to get it to work for Linux users?

The short answer is “not yet.” The long answer is “it’s possible now, but probably more trouble than it’s worth.” In theory, you could run a windows compatibility program such as Wine, install the windows version of a browser and run it under Wine, make sure you have the UNITY plug-in for it, and follow the link to my program. I haven’t tried this myself.

What a shame. I probably won't bother with all of that.

No. I don’t recommend anyone try this. I’m sure it would be a pain. Hopefully, I will have a real solution for Linux at a later date. By then, the game would probably be in a more enjoyable state. Thanks for showing interest and I’m sorry I don’t have a good solution.