The Korea Baduk Association recently released a new app called Legend of Baduk!
It’s designed to help beginners reach up to 15-kyu, and it’s available in both Korean and English.
The app is structured like a game, you have to clear stages to move up, learning Go as you go. It also offers training features and even lets you play against an AI designed for beginners.
I tried it for about an hour today, and I think it’s a great tool for teaching newcomers and kids. You can find it on both the Google Play Store and the App Store!
Unfortunately, due to initial budget constraints, the app was not built with localization features in mind. The app was built with limited budget and still very buggy. I assume we - KBA - will not work on localization. However, we are very happy to see your interest in our app. We will certainly make localization a top priority for future contents, if our budget allows.
I’ve tested the play against AI feature, and noticed that during the game, it is just running locally (when internet connection is off), only when click counting, it would “sync” to the server (I think just to store game states, and items). I wonder if it is possible to isolate the play against AI feature and make it an independent app (or even a paid app feature not even need for all ranks). I feel the practice of a whole game might be more helpful for beginners, instead of gatekeeping it with limited AI games per day (or purchase).
In short, unfortunately, we cannot achieve that at the moment.
Only those stages for 30~21 Kyu are ran locally. But counting actually requires internet connection.
Since we do not have our own development team, nor we have much experience on developing Go features, we do not have our own library or whatsoever to help counting. AI from 20 Kyu and counting feature runs on our server(on the computer just next to me ).
Well, counting, if the user can exactly judge and select dead stones, is surely an easy feature to make but we did not expect beginners(our main target) can achieve that. Also, it would be inappropriate if users could select dead stones as it can be abused. So we allowed users to select whenever(Still, there is a restriction for minimum move count) they want to count but rely on AI’s judgement for counting.
Limiting AI games per day was necessary as running game server burns our money
From a continuing service and running perspective, I can see the reasoning for locking the feature behind ads with daily limits. But from prompting Go learning and education perspective, especially with joining with KBA assuming non-profit, it would probably hurt more for student’s applying what they learn and actually finishing games themselves as a sense of accomplishment, and not just a glorified tsumego UI. (as someone teaching Go, I can see the shadow of Go textbook and chapters as levels, with highly repeated quiz/homeworks at the end of sessions, which we usually would have a more varied quiz pool than the teaching material pool)
Although, if I’d design myself, I’d spread the counting and server load for TPK games on their device locally (it would also reduce the bandwidth and server loading cost), and there are several ways to achieve that easily, one is to use atari Go rules (not just the first capture, but comparing which side has more capture, and you can use one IF statement to determine the game result), another one is to use a PureGo rule (those who has more stones on the board wins), and it can be achieve with two nested FOR loop to determine the result. Or Tromp-Taylor Rules , with students asked to fill the boundary and capture dead stones manually before counting (not marked dead stones, which would result similarly to Atari Go where TPK bots just keep throw in at any open intersection anyway).
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