Alternative move input methods

Have any of you explored alternative input methods for playing Go on the computer? I don’t especially like using the mouse, but so far, it’s the best method for me.

I’ve tried Voice Goban, which is a really cool project. You select an area on the screen where the goban is, and then it takes audio input and controls the mouse. You just say coordinates (letter-number, and you can use the nato phonetic alphabet too). It’s pretty cool, but I don’t love it for faster games, and it’s not 100% reliable. Great accessibility tool, though!!

A friend of mine wrote a program to take input from a MIDI controller, like a digital piano, and convert it into mouse movement. It’s really cool, but pretty tricky to work with. He made it so I could fully customize exactly what each note/combination of notes did, but I wasn’t able to find a way to use it effectively without taking ridiculous amounts of focus. You can see a goofy example i recorded here - midiKeyboardGoMouseInput (link will expire in a day, but i can put it somewhere else if necessary)

I think I’ll explore that piano input method more later, but now that I’m learning about vim, I’m curious what kind of creative computer keyboard input methods might work for Go. Just typing coordinates feels a little clunky.

If you have a numpad, something like MouseGrid (nuance.com) might work really well.
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You would maybe select a 9th of the go board, then another grid would pop up within that bit, and you’d select the exact coordinate using a single number. The same thing could work for the 19x19, by using the first input to select either tengen, one of the lines extending from tengen, or one of the 4 quadrants excluding the 10th line - then, assuming you didn’t play Tengen, you’d be left w/ either a line of 9 points or a 9x9 quadrant, and you’d go from there.

I think a cooler solution, though, would be to use vim-like motions. You could use hjkl to move one coordinate at a time, or multiple by using the number keys. Or maybe you could jump to the closest of a given shape. There are a lot of different motions that would work, I think.

Has anybody else here put much thought into this kind of thing? The use case is almost nonexistent, I’m sure, but it seems like it could be fun

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Yes! A workable keyboard input (and tts output) mechanism would help vision impaired users play!

I am also interested in voice input. Hadn’t heard of Voice goban, so thanks for sharing!

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An idea I just had was that you could type a move by its distance from the corner, like 34 for the 3-4 points, and then it would display all possible moves like this:


and you’d confirm which move by selecting the number on it. Could also work for
named points like ‘komoku’, and you could give a command like km or something.

I know I said it’s not 100% reliable, but that’s just because I’m kind of chaotic. If you’re in a reasonably quiet environment and you can remember not to hold conversations at the same time as giving verbal input, it probably will work fine :joy:

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I wonder if LLMs could help with this… I’m definitely not focused enough to only say coordinates a whole game either haha.

One area I think voice input would be useful would be smart glasses, where the mouse is non-existent. AI is becoming pretty well integrated to those types of devices, so not so far-fetched to make it parse out the “move command” part of the conversation :thinking:


Edit: To your point about komoku, a properly trained LLM could probably help parse out “named moves” as well. But knowing how AI does generating Go-related art, it probably needs a lot of prompting to make it smart enough to understand Go moves heh

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Using the touch screen on a tablet notebook.

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