At our office, I thought it’d be a nice challenge to run a computer Go tournament - individuals could submit their computer Go program, and the best program’s author gets a big prize and gets to explain how he did it (sorry, only male hackers around so far). Apart from a bit of an exercise in AI, one of the fun aspects is that each can use his own programming language because interfacing is trivial through the Go Text Protocol.

Anyway, we need a tournament and practice server, so I set up NNGS on my box to act as one. It is accessible at the usual ports, like here, and feel free to use it if you want to play a game with a mate or test drive your own Go programs (two instances of Gnu Go, one at the default level, one at level 1, are usually attached to the server so you can play against a computer opponent at any time). qGo is a nice client for the server.

Under the title “writing a Go program or how to embarrass yourself in public” (I don’t know anything about this sort of stuff so I’m going to make lots of dumb mistakes) I hope to keep you posted about my competition entry, which will be done in Smalltalk of course (Squeak initially because I like the environment better but I may switch to VisualWorks for performance reasons later on).

And, yes, I do know that Go is a hard problem to knack, even with our simple tournament rules (9×9 board and 5 minutes thinking time). What’s a tournament without a bit of challenge, eh?

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