“Sente - Online GO” App for Android

Thanks for the report, I’ll try to figure out what’s going on. Thing is Sofia is such an interesting case because she doesn’t actually have to do anything to highlight any bugs. If there is a corner-case that would make the app malfunction in a game (say a rectangle rengo game with 3 undos) she’ll have it in her 1000 games somewhere :slight_smile:

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True!
Btw in general I like hunting bugs and helping to find what’s wrong, however sometimes I’m afraid of overdoing it so forgive me if that’s the case :slight_smile:
Let’s not forget that the app works very well (especially with “normal” users) and it’s very good that it exists!

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You’re not overdoing it, don’t worry. I’m used to have testers in the dev team whose paid full-time job is to find bugs in my code :slight_smile: I appreciate your help.

Sadly, what happened here is that anoek made a change to the timers which are now tracked to fractions of milliseconds and kinda breaks my app.

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Can you please try again Sofia? I think Anoek fixed that issue, please let me know if you’re still seeing the dialog.

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I keep seeing it not anymore

And i add something, maybe it helps:
this game keeps appearing even if it’s not my turn. In this moment, the last move that has been played is e2 but in the app I see the previous move. I can’t submit e2 nor any other move and that game doesn’t disappear from my "your move " list.
It could be because it’s private. I don’t know if I have other private games in this moment.

It’s because Anoek fixed the problem for all games… once a move is made on that game. This leaves people that only use the app in a nasty position :slight_smile:

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Hello,

I have been trying your app for a few days. Congrats and thank you for making this app.

Now on to the criticism:

  • About “Play against an AI”.

I have played a few games against KataGo. In the last game that I played, I won, but KataGo was displaying 99% confidence that it was winning, up until we both passed. I think this is due to a discrepancy between the Japanese rules (which are used by your app to decide the result of the game) and the Chinese rules (which are used by KataGo’s engine). As a result, I think KataGo didn’t play very well (it let one of its groups die, because it thought it was winning anyway).

There was a similar issue in the 1st World Championship in 2017. DeepZenGo was invited to play in the championship, alongside Park Junghwan, Mi Yuting and Iyama Yuta. DeepZenGo lost one of the games by 0.5 after playing a bad endgame, because the championship was held under Japanese rules with 5.5 komi, but DeepZen was evaluating the board under Chinese rules with 7.5 komi.

A simple way to fix this bug is to set the “play against an AI” settings in your app to Chinese rules by default. There are several advantages for Chinese rules over Japanese rules, especially on a 9x9 board:

  • The AI will no longer believe it’s winning when it’s not
  • The very popular 9x9 and 13x13 server GoQuest uses Chinese rules with 7 komi
  • On 9x9 for a human player, it is much much much faster to evaluate the exact score during the game under area scoring (Chinese-style) than under territory scoring (Japanese-style).
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Continuing with a few points of criticism:

  • There is a display bug when a game ends. The text “Game ended because of two passes. Final score is…”, which appears when the game ends, is overlaid with the text “Prisoners: …; Komi: …” which is shown during the whole game. As a result, both texts look merged together and almost impossible to read.

  • The UI is pretty good when playing a game. However, I struggle with the “Search for a game” commands. In particular, it would be great if we could see the list of open challenges, like we can on the OGS website. (If that is already possible, I haven’t found how to do it). On more than one occasion I decided to start a game using OGS in browser on my computer, then play the game with the app.

  • The “pass” button has a pretty counterintuitive icon.

  • I couldn’t find a “resign” button.

Thank you for the feedback. I do agree there is space for improvement.

That is a possibility. Sadly there are 2 problems with that: for play online the rules are japanese(-ish) and I can’t change that because of OGS and also the tutorial I picked is from a japanese source hence it talks about counting prisoners. I’ll have to figure something out.

That whole screen will get rewritten from scratch in the next few months. You won’t have that bug, but you’ll have plenty of others :smiley:

You used to be able to see it but I removed it and I won’t add it again. I am strongly against the existence of so many different ways to start a game and I won’t confuse the user further by exposing them.

I’m considering other options for the rewrite, and I’m also going to have a text describing the actions. I’m thinking of using a the square (as in the stop sign on old VCRs).

It’s in the more menu (first icon on the left).

New version is out. Fixed a bug with Chinese handicap games causing the analysis to not work correctly.

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I’ve played my first 19x19 game on the app! It was a lightning game with 10s/move and I didn’t lose on time, and didn’t do a single misclick. This is a good point for the UI.

On a different note:
When playing against KataGo, the “estimated score” and “probability to win” which are displayed are only updated after KataGo plays. In particular, they are not updated when a new game is started. Until KataGo has made their first move, the values displayed correspond to the previous game.

[quote=“MrAlex, post:755, topic:34438”]
You used to be able to see it but I removed it and I won’t add it again. I am strongly against the existence of so many different ways to start a game and I won’t confuse the user further by exposing them.
[/quote]That is disappointing. If there is an open challenge on OGS that suits me, then I’d like to be able to play that game. Currently the way I use your app is to start games with my computer then play on the app, which kinda defeats the whole point of having an app.

I kept using the app. For correspondence games only. I can’t use it for live games, because I have never managed to start a game from the app. So I can only play games on the app that I have started from the computer.

I have one more complaint about the UI: the “score” icon.

Currently there is a “score” icon with a number for each player.

Once the game is over, this number is the score of the player. However, during the game, it’s unclear what the number is. It appears to at least sum the komi and the captured prisoners. For instance, if playing with 6.5 komi, and White has captured one black stone, then White’s score will appear as “7.5”. This is very confusing and makes it look like the game is being played with 7.5 komi. If Black has captured no stone, their score is “0.0”; and if they have captured 3 stones, their score is “3.0”.

I suggest having three different icons:

  • one for the score, only shown once the game has been scored;
  • one for the komi, only used for white (or for black in case of reversed komi);
  • one for the number of prisoners, always shown for both players.

Also, I suggest not adding “.0” after an integer number. It’s a bit confusing because it seems to imply that the score could be a non-integer. I suggest only using “.5” when needed, and never “.0”.

I wonder it’s related to the number that show up on the mini goban.

That is if you look at an ongoing game in the web version from your profile/home page or on someone else’s profile I think there’s a similar score shown for each player.

I think if you click the player card in the web version at various points of a game too it does something like count surrounded territory, stones, captures and komi.

It seems clear enough since you know exactly what it is. One the game is over it shows only the total score, not territory+prisoners+Komi. Why should it be different during the game?

Does it matter to playing if the score during the game is shown as the total of prisoners and Komi or separately? I would suggest not. However an app is played on a phone typically so any unnecessary clutter is bad generally.

Since you seem to fully understand what is shown and it uses the minimum space then it seems like it’s working well.

I agree with this.

I don’t understand what you’re saying. Why should what be different from what? Once the game is over, it can be scored, and the score is correctly displayed next to the score icon. But while the game is ongoing, the “score” icon is already there, and from what I could guess after observing it in a few different positions, I think it shows the sum of prisoners and komi.

Sorry if I was unclear, I guess? On my phone, the app sometimes displays: “white: 7.5” when in fact we’re playing with 6.5 komi, not 7.5.

Ah, ok so the problem is you’d like a different icon for “score so far” or “Komi and prisoners” during the game.

But is this after you have captured a stone? I.e. white has 6.5 Komi and 1 prisoner.

As you say:

And you are thinking correctly.

If you are saying that you’d like two numbers, Komi and prisoners separately, then that’s understandable but my thought is that it’s not really necessary and has the disadvantage of adding clutter.

Actually, any of those options would be better in my opinion:

  • display the prisoners and the komi
  • display only the komi
  • display only the prisoners
  • display nothing at all

You say it would “add clutter”. I say it would remove one false information (such as “white has 7.5 komi” when in fact white is playing with only 6.5 komi) and replace it with zero, one or two true information.

There appears to be a bug with the ranks in the app.

I am currently playing a game against a player who currently appears as 4d on OGS: ArsenLapin1 vs. kazurotte

A few hours ago, the app was telling me this player was 5d. And right now, the app is telling me this player is 6d. When I look at their profile in my browser they have a very stable 4d rank.

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If there is a ko in Analysis mode, the move numbers are superimpressed on top of each other: