You people are smart, you can piece together the sketch…
You have, for example, @Clossius1, @TelegraphGo or @BenKyo_Baduk - all are software developers, and all are Go teachers. Any one of them could lash together TRengo which is something like this…
You have two teachers, each inducts in a fresh batch of students - maybe 10 or 12 to allow for attrition. It’s on a good faith basis, that they’re TDK, or whatever the stated rank range is. For a fixed time period, who knows 3 months or whatever, they each train their minions with whatever frequency and methods they see fit. At the end of the training, you play a TRengo series. Each teacher plays the other, but with a difference. Each student uses the TRengo interface to play each move on their (cloned) board which ghosts it up to the trainers board (perhaps anonymously). To the teacher it’s like choosing from a bunch of AI suggestions, except that it’s SI (Student Intelligence) suggestions. It’s in the teachers interests to train their minions well.
You get:
An excuse if you lose (hey, I just had a dud batch of students). No-one loses face.
Massive buy-in from the students, they are invested in the game
You draw out the shyer players suggestions
You encourage at least some of the team to always look for the tenuki move, full board thinking
You have review material for subsequent lessons, why you chose ‘A’ instead of ‘B’
I don’t imagine it will happen in the real world, but in my imaginary world this is already a thing.
p.s. I would donate real world coin to this if it were a thing. Not a lot, but some.
We already got “Rengo” because someone said “I’d pay real coin for this”
As described, Trengo sounds too niche and fragile. What is the total possible user-base of teachers who have that many students who might use it on OGS? How often would they get together to arrange a match? What are the chances that they don’t talk to each other on the side?
On the plus side, this would not have to be limited to teacher+student groups: anyone could be the “move-chooser” of a TRengo team. And it could be a rengo variant set up in a way where the choosers don’t (easily) know who’s on their team.
Yes, yes, reality and such. If such a tournament were to occur though, I for one, would not miss it.
I imagine that they just walk in to the local University with a wheelbarrow, a roll of clingwrap and ask “Who wants to learn Go?”. Then they stand back and watch their wheelbarrow fill up to the brim with crisp 100 dollar bills. (They bought the clingwrap to stop the bills blowing away - Go players plan ahead).
That is exactly what was done in the days before the formal rengo capability existed. The team captains actually played the moves, and the team discussions were held in private PM threads in the Forums, one for each team. The only difference is that the discussions were open within the team, rather than having each member submit a move to the captain (or teacher), which obviously has greater teaching possibilities.
So this idea can be done now without any special coding.
Options within options, maybe they can override but at a points cost (which increases with each use). Maybe there’s no points cost, but a limited number of overrides.
That’s actually what sparked the idea. I’ve seen that done on streams, it works but it seems kinda low-rent although functional.
It sounds like something that either catches on or it doesn’t, since it’s such a specific play mode and mainly only for teachers and students too, however I think it sounds like a lot of fun if nothing else! I see the value of it and I think it would be a blast to play. If I’ve understood it correctly, there isn’t really any pride or anything at stake so I don’t think we’d need to worry or even think about the stuff about losing face.
I will add that I don’t have time for this kind of side project, and I don’t write code anymore (although I think I could jump back in pretty easily if I ever wanted to, same for really any ex-dev I imagine).
