A year ago today I made the first commit to the Git repository of Simple Go. Coincidentally, I finished the new release I’ve been working on almost exactly one year after the first commit. The major new features in the latest version are a simplified status bar, a settings dialog window, and the use of a configuration file to store settings.

Additionally, with the new settings dialog comes the ability to control more settings, including the player names (to be stored in SGF files), setting GNU Go to control either Black or White (or both), controlling the number of seconds GNU Go can use to make a move or score the game, and specifying the komi value.

At this point, Simple Go does more or less everything I’d envisioned when I first started the project. Of course, I will continue to fix bugs and add new features when inspiration strikes, but at this point I’m happy with how Simple Go turned out, and will use it to record my games. So there you have it — from idea to realization in one year!

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.

As I’ve mentioned briefly, I am an amateur Go player. A big part of the appeal of the game to me is the elegance of the rules. The rules are so simple that as a programmer I almost felt obligated to translate the rules into actual code at some point. In fact, I’ve worked on-and-off on a Go implementation for some months now. The result:

I actually posted this on my website a month ago, but I just added the ability to save games and updated the compiled downloads, so I figure it’s time to officially announce it here.

As far as Go implementations go, it is rather basic; one unique feature that it has is the ability to play random games, i.e., when both players place their stones on the board randomly. I was curious the kinds of patterns that would arise in such games, and how such games would end, assuming that players don’t pass unless absolutely necessary and that no board position can ever repeat (superko). This was another impetus for writing Simple Go, since I couldn’t find any other program which allowed me to try this.

Simple Go was written in C++ using the cross-platform library wxWidgets. The source code is available on GitHub, but pre-compiled binaries are also available on its webpage.

Enjoy – I quite enjoyed writing it.