Review: GNU GoS60
Score:
75%
Version Reviewed: 0.1
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Go is hard. You can take your 'completely worked out how to play draughts (checkers)' programs, and 'we’ve beaten the best human player in the world' chess computers – the big artificial intelligence challenge for the 21st century is making a professional 'computer' Go player.
Go is an insanely complicated game – while there are computerised versions out there that prove an incredibly strong challenge to the amateur, there’s no electronic version that is measurably stronger than a 'level 4' Go player – something that about a year of study can be achieved. But when you balance this against the sheer complexity that a Go board has, with just a handful of basic rules you find that you can get a well balanced game, at least for beginners and those to new to Go.
And so to GNU GoS60 – an open source implementation of Go for S60 devices. Available for S60 2nd and 3rd Editions, it’s a bare bones application – you get a board (and you can play on a 9x9, 13x13 or even a 19x19 board – that’s five times the area of a chess board, fact fans) and a moving cursor to place down your black pieces. There’s no changing the skill level, there are no fancy board layouts, there’s no changing anything. You get what you get and that’s it.
One annoyance to me is that when you place your piece on the board and the computer starts working on it’s move (which can take some time), your piece doesn’t show up – once the computer makes their move then both pieces show up. There’s also no feedback given while the computer is thinking. Also, there is no response from the application while thinking; menus don’t work and all key presses are cached until the computer stops thinking and makes its move.
Sounds like I’m ready to blast GNU Go out the water? Far from it.
I suspect a lot of these problems are because GNU Go is a straight port of the GNU engine, with enough of the Symbian/S60 UI code added to get it working on a smartphone. And this really appeals to me. It’s a program put together by one person, for himself, and it’s being shared with others. That’s miles away from the pile ‘em high and sell licences by the bucket load attitude that exists in the Java games and ringtone business. So for all the faults, the straying away from style guides, the lack of customisation, I really enjoy this app.
Why? Partly, it’s because in-depth strategy games are my forte, and, while I’m not a great Go player, it’s nice to have a genuine challenge on my N95; partly because I think the colour scheme of a yellow board with black/white pieces is relaxing and retro chic; and partly because I think that Go is just cool.
Have a read about Go at Wikipedia first, and if it’s piqued your interest, then this is as good a place as any to start practicing the game yourself. And looking at the blog, there are lots of tweaks and updates planned by the author. Even better.
-- Ewan Spence
Reviewed by Ewan Spence at