Software Review

The central tool of this program is a life and death problem solver, which is capable of getting the right answer to problems considerably more difficult than any other program I know of. It uses this capacity in several ways:

The programme is very easy to use, with an intuitive interface. Twelve large buttons at the top, information down the left, and the board taking up most of the rest of the screen. It does all you would expect: saving games, loading complete and partly complete games, stepping backwards and forwards through saved games. You can add comments to the games but there is no facility to record alternative sequences.

This is mainly a program which plays go. The standard is about as good as you can get at present. I find actual grades hard to judge, but Go Professional plays at a similar level to Many Faces of Go or Handtalk, it does not try to swindle you as much as Handtalk, and plays quite correctly for much of the time. For all three programs I can give a 9 stone handicap and win by over 100 points without difficulty, but killing every stone on the board is very difficult (I have not managed that against Go Professional yet). Anyone below 10 kyu can expect a decent challenge.

To run Go Professional, you will need a PC running Windows 95, with a CDrom drive and a graphics card that supports a 256-colour mode (or better).

To run Go Professional, you will need a PC running Windows 95, with a CDrom drive and a graphics card that supports a 256-colour mode (or better).

Installing it is easy, but you must run it directly from the CD. It is not possible to copy it to your hard disk. It has options for English or French settings.

Review by Nick Wedd, from British Go Journal 132 (Autumn 2003)

Previous we have carried reviews of Go Professional, Go Professional II, and Go Professional III. These programs used the Go-playing engine written by Dr. Michael (Mick) Reiss, which competed in international Computer Go tournaments under the name Go4++. Dr. Reiss was under contract to Oxford Softworks, which later became part of Purple Software, and received a salary from them and small royalties for each copy of his program that they sold. They embellished it with a decorative user interface and marketed it as Go Professional, and in other ways.

However, Purple Software recently went into liquidation and was unable to meet its debts. Dr. Reiss was able to retrieve full rights to the Go-playing engine he had written, and is now marketing it himself as Go++.

One of the methods of study which has always been favoured by strong players is to go through games. The laborious method of placing 200 stones on a board from a diagram has shown its worth over the years. In the computer era there is a choice.

It is still much to early too say that the machine-assisted study of games brings the same benefits. It may be that it will influence the training of future professionals, in particular outside the Far East. With a database of games some types of analysis become much easier, perhaps even the "line of least resistance". For example the classification of fuseki patterns is likely to be undertaken in the next decade, with results which cannot at this point be predicted, simply because thousands of games will be available in machine-readable form.

BGJ 119 Autumn 2000

Reviewer: Mogens Jakobsen, June 2000, with help from Lene & Lasse

Installation was very easy. However when I tried to run it on two PCs running Windows NT, it did not load, but produced ten "ding" sounds. Presumably this is an error message, stating that it does not like NT, or high-resolution graphics, or something. But the manual is minimal, and gives no explanation of this.

Go Dojo is a Go training program. It runs only on Windows (or Linux/Wine). Its author is Bruce Wilcox, the author of the Go-playing program EZ-Go, and originator of the concept of “sector lines”.

The structure of the program

It is easy to install and run. It does not use the Windows registry (something which I am very thankful for—my registry is now a hopeless mess and I don't know how to disentangle it). When you run it, you can customise the size of the window it runs in, and the size of the font that it uses. It remembers these settings and applies them next time you run it, which is very convenient. It also remembers where you got to last time you ran it, and automatically resumes from there.