Another interesting way to think about playing against various bots is
What are you actually learning from interacting with that bot? If you keep playing the same bot over and over, what sorts of things will you begin to expect – and will that help or hinder you when you encounter human opponents?
In this sense, for the beginner hoping to learn the 19x19 game, the 40 – 25 kyu bots are indeed of very low utility. Because they make so many terrible mistakes on so many levels, even beating such bots can teach all kinds of bad habits players will need to un-learn later.
The flips side of that coin is – for the 18-25 kyu beginner – playing 19x19 against SDK level bots is just confusing. Against a stronger opponent, it’s difficult for DDKs to figure out WHY they lost a given game, because there are so many aspects of gameplay they haven’t learned yet.
There’s one bot I’ve played enough over the years that I’ve begun to personify it – to treat it as a particular “type” of player that has certain dependable habits – and that is GnuGo
GnuGo is old skool – from way back in 1989 – long before AI. And yet, with very minimal programming (the total file size of the .exe is 660 Kilobytes!) it can play anywhere from 17 kyu to 7 kyu.
That is a BROAD skill range, and yet it retains a bit of the same “personality” as you slide the difficulty slider from 10 to 1 inside the app (assuming you’ve downloaded it onto your home PC, etc).
If you’d like to play ranked games against GnuGo there are a couple of bot accts at various strengths:
~16 kyu
https://online-go.com/player/58441/
~7kyu
https://online-go.com/player/942460/
I started bashing my head against this bot on my laptop way back around 2003 or so. Once I found OGS and started the climb from 23 kyu to the ~8kyu I am now, I kept playing GnuGo and trying different strategies as I leveled up.
In my 19x19 FOR BEGINNERS series articles, I analyze a LOT of games I’ve played against GnuGo, because I can sort of predict its responses and play a certain “type” of game – and the resulting games make for a clear and easy-to-understand “story” because there is a nice order to the Stages of the Game, etc.
Anyway, based on those experiences – I would say that GnuGo actually makes a pretty good learning tool for beginner who wants to get from DDK to SDK.
STRENGTHS
Regardless of the setting on the in-app difficulty slider, GnuGo is consistently good at the following elements
- Correctly reading whole-board position values for any Stage of the Game
- Playing an Opening which maximizes moyo potential
- In Midgame, correctly driving direction of play to maximize that moyo
- Keeping local stones connected
- Making good shape
- Reading out capturing races / life or death
- Cutting and killing your weak groups
- Ko fights
Unlike 40-25kyu bots, GnuGo never makes obvious mistakes, and it ends up teaching good habits in things that are difficult to describe to beginners – like the proper time to play a gote move and settle one’s stones, etc.
Beginner players who start each game recklessly attacking their opponent are surprised when GnuGo sacrifices stone after stone, and still ends up winning by over 50 points because White got the huge center moyo, and Black fought tooth and nail for tiny captured areas. GnuGo is great at exploiting shape mistakes (cutting and capturing) and direction of play mistakes (making big moyos) so effectively, that it forces the beginner player to become a GENERALIST rather than a specialist.
Beginners realize that their skills in solving Tsumego will do them no good if they can’t play a Balanced Opening and end up consistently being 30 points down by move 80 because their opponent built another moyo, and now they have no choice but to do a risky invasion.
The games are also easy to review afterwards – because GnuGo plays in a consistent way – if you are LOSING consistently, then a good review will help you identify your weaknesses, and help you think of ways of playing differently and adapting your game – i.e. if you know your opponent tends to do X, how can you disrupt that, or do it yourself and cancel out that advantage?
WEAKNESSES
Eventually, as the beginner slowly levels up into a more disciplined player, one begins to find the weaknesses in GnuGo’s play-style. GnuGo is consistently
- Sacrificing weak groups early in the Opening in trade for bigger moyo potential elsewhere
- Playing tenuki moves at the wrong time and leaving lethal cutting points
- Ignoring Urgent gote moves when Big sente moves are available
- Making errors when juggling multiple weak groups, specifically about which of them to keep alive
So yeah, assuming the beginning player is also regularly playing games against human opponents – so that they can keep a big grain of salt between their teeth and remember that learning from ANY bot will only help on see a tiny narrow slice of the possible state-space of the Go game – I do find that it has been a very helpful tool to myself, to have a consistent opponent who plays in a certain way, and forces me to have really good habits in terms of Go fundamentals – at least until I can level up to 3-5 kyu and just consistently kill all GnuGo’s groups, but I’m not there yet
Anyway – my 2 cents.