[Kde-games-devel] kigo

[Matthew Woehlke]

Sascha Peilicke wrote:
> On Wednesday 21 October 2009 18:33:53 Matthew Woehlke wrote:
>> Arturo Silva wrote:
>>> Well, I'm happy to report that I managed to successfully build,
>>> install and play Kigo!  ^^
>>> It looks good, but I probably neglected to mention before that I've
>>> never played Go before, so I got my rear handed by the computer quite
>>> easily. ^^;
>> Um... I *have* played before, and I experience that at easiest
>> difficulty and with a handicap of 9 stones. Sad to say, so far I don't
>> think kigo is going to be usable by anyone that is not already an
>> experienced player :-(.
> Agreed, you actually have to know at least the basic rules to get around at 
> the moment. A tutorial mode that takes you through the basics could be added 
> later on ...

IMO that's going to have to be some insanely good tutorial, I guess. I 
do know the basic rules (maybe not basic /strategies/, but that's not 
what you said), and I still get utterly dominated even by the easiest 
setting.

Which... is the point. Right now I don't see kigo as at all useable by 
casual players. (I suppose the same would be true of, say, chess. 
Actually it's true of kfourinline also, which is why I never play it.)

I think the basic problem (with both kfourinline and kigo) is that the 
computer, even on 'easy', doesn't make mistakes the way a novice human 
player does.

For kigo, a better "easy" level of difficulty might be to take the gnugo 
moves and have a random chance of a: taking the best one, b: taking a 
suggested move at random, c: taking a totally random move.

(Speaking of mistakes, 'undo' is broken. If it's not going to actually 
undo, it needs to be named 'replay' or something.)

-- 
Matthew
Please do not quote my e-mail address unobfuscated in message bodies.
-- 
"Every cloud has a silver lining (except for the mushroom shaped ones, 
which have a lining of iridium and strontium 90)" -- Sean Dwyer