In the ongoing KataGo distributed training run, all sorts of different board sizes are used for training games, including non-square boards! I think it’s really interesting to see superhuman play on these strange boards, so I thought it would be nice to have a thread for sharing and discussing them.
Click on any of the images below to see the full game!
This 19x14 game starts from a somewhat familiar opening:
19x9 is a nice size since it combines the most popular square board sizes 
These two 7x19 games start with the same 5 moves, but then diverge into very different outcomes:
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Can KataGo train on irrectangular or lacunar boards, though?
(eg. the one in Semi-random starting position + flexible komi)
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A ko in the lower right resulted in a huge trade:
Who do you think is ahead?
See the full game here
Final position of a 19x9 game:
See the full game here
I get the feeling that seki occurs more frequently in these games than on square boards… maybe it’s just confirmation bias, but it certainly seems possible that the geometry of the board would affect the seki rate.
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How often do you think seki occurs on 9x9 for example?
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No idea really! And I’m not sure what is the correct way to quantify the “seki rate”. Average number of seki per game, or percentage of groups that are seki? I could manually check some small number of games from KataGo to compare, but it wouldn’t be statistically significant anyways.
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