Board Game Arena

I feel like this should be in an FAQ somewhere, but I can't find it, and searching for "go" is completely futile.

So surely there must be some reason, but why is Go not available for play?

Because nobody has coded it.

Go is in the public domain, so there are no issues with getting rights to it (the other reason of "why isn't <<game>> on this site?").

But, BGA does not hire programmers. It is volunteer work. So, someone with the skills must donate their time. So far, nobody has.

Jest Phulin wrote:Because nobody has coded it.

Go is in the public domain, so there are no issues with getting rights to it (the other reason of "why isn't <<game>> on this site?").

But, BGA does not hire programmers. It is volunteer work. So, someone with the skills must donate their time. So far, nobody has.

Right. I just... given the fact that there are no rights issues and that (I think?) the rules are very simple, I'm just surprised that it's not here, when so many other public domain games are: chess, checkers, backgammon. And with gomoku, even the graphics resources are here. Given all that, I thought there must be another reason.

generic wrote:Right. I just... given the fact that there are no rights issues and that (I think?) the rules are very simple,

Actually, while the rules are very simple, it can be a pain to implement mostly due to the end-game scoring. In even early amateur play, humans can easily see which territories are conceded and not worth fighting for and will pass while there are still contested pieces out. You would essentially have to write a decently advanced AI that would play out the end-game scenario to confirm which color would win each remaining contested area once both players have passed. Not saying it's not doable, but I don't think it's actually as simple as it seems at first.

Alternately, you could skip the AI and just have a mechanism where players could click to score different contested areas for each side during scoring. As long as players are honorable, this should go well 98% of the time but would be annoying when a player wanted to cause a stink and claims they could have still won an area even though they had a losing position.

squarerootofthree wrote:

generic wrote:Right. I just... given the fact that there are no rights issues and that (I think?) the rules are very simple,

Actually, while the rules are very simple, it can be a pain to implement mostly due to the end-game scoring. In even early amateur play, humans can easily see which territories are conceded and not worth fighting for and will pass while there are still contested pieces out. You would essentially have to write a decently advanced AI that would play out the end-game scenario to confirm which color would win each remaining contested area once both players have passed. Not saying it's not doable, but I don't think it's actually as simple as it seems at first.

Alternately, you could skip the AI and just have a mechanism where players could click to score different contested areas for each side during scoring. As long as players are honorable, this should go well 98% of the time but would be annoying when a player wanted to cause a stink and claims they could have still won an area even though they had a losing position.

Ah, thanks for clearing it up. I don't even really know the rules, but I was interested in trying it out.