Boidhre wrote:I'm familar with many of the arguments against playing with AIs but I'm attracted to MFOG's review function where it gives its thoughts on your moves or better moves than the one you made.
I have gotten no value at all out of the above. The reasoning is just contextless "local shape move" "try to kill enemy group" or whatever, and you really already knew that.
I have both MFOG and Crazy Stone. MFOG is useful in that it is really easy to turn the engine on and off (click the player name) when you are looking at a position to get a quick evaluation and it has a cool "lookahead" feature where it graphically shows numbered variations that it is thinking about. The other thing that is good is that it gives positional evaluations in probabilities on other squares where you could've moved, so if your move and its move both show "53" or something, you can probably decide this isn't the huge game-losing blunder if that's what you're looking for. And also, if you click on a group it will tell you if it thinks it is alive or dead or dying or seki or whatever.
One thing that I don't like about MFOG is that I can't figure out how to change the time settings in an sgf file that I am reviewing, and if I played a 45 + 5/30 game and was in byo-yomi on a particular move then the computer is only willing to think for 30 seconds in order to not time out. I get round this by editing the sgf file to add more time, but it is annoying. The overall feel of MFOG is the same sort of form-over-substance retro that KGS does.
Crazy stone has recently introduced functionality into the English version to get an automatic review of the game with a little chart (like here: http://www.grappa.univ-lille3.fr/~coulo ... index.html ) and you can get a list of the moves where your moves differed from its moves and how big a mistake it thought it was. Also, when you are on a move you can ask it and it will give you a list of what it thinks are good/bad moves and how good/bad it thinks they are. MFOG kind of does this but Crazy Stone's stuff is a little slicker, I think. However, the interface for the analysis is a little clumsy (you can't sort the list or anything like that) and overall Crazy Stone feels a bit more like a game and navigation of the game feels clumsy (you have to use ctrl-arrow to go forward a move, for example), but I bought it on the basis of the evaluation feature and am really happy with it.
Oh, and somehow the Crazy Stone engine finds moves much more quickly than MFOG. On my machine Crazy Stone with 15 minutes of time beats MFOG with an hour of time. Whether that is a difference in the engines or whether Crazy Stone is hogging processor space on my machine etc I would not know.
Sorry; tldr: MFOG is a little more user-friendly with navigating and clicking on a group so it tells you if it thinks it is alive or dead is cool. Crazy Stone is slicker and can auto-analyse game records. When I play them against each other on the same machine, Crazy Stone wins but this is not actually a big concern for me.
