I just released a new version of Simple Go, my implementation of the game of Go. The major new feature in this release is the ability to interface with GNU Go, at least on Linux. This means that one can now use Simple Go as a GUI to play against GNU Go, or just have GNU Go suggest moves. Additionally, scoring can now be done with GNU Go, so that it isn’t necessary to explicitly kill dead groups at the end of the game.

A known bug is that GNU Go will get confused if you make a suicide move and then disable the ability to suicide, as it doesn’t seem to support an option to disable suicide mid-game. I might look into a workaround in the future, but for now I think this is a sufficiently unusual use case that I’m not overly concerned.

The other main new feature is the ability to load games from SGF files; not all properties are supported at the moment but you can at least open and modify your previous games.