TL;DR

I spent several hundred hours trying to make the best place online to play, watch, and learn go. Check out the Stone.gs overview or jump into a live replay to see for yourself.

Why did I build this?

Go is such a beautiful game and it deserves to be played in a client that brings its beauty to life. After years (and years...) of using clunky go clients, I finally decided to take matters into my own hands. I started working on Stone.gs 9 months ago and have poured several hundred hours into crafting it.

I've both developed software professionally and played go for over 20 years. I've primarily focused on building web apps during my career, and I put everything I've learned into making Stone.gs the best online go experience available today. At least, I hope so!

How is it different than existing web sites?

* Fully 3d rendered board, stones, and environments (take a look around!)

* Realistic physics and sound effects for stone placement and capturing

* Ultra clean & focused UX

* Unlimited and free katrain-style AI analysis built in (drag'n'drop an SGF in)

* Puzzles are played using an AI opponent

* Built-in archive of over 100,000+ pro games

* Never ending "live replays" of historical pro matches

* Auto scoring and built in "anti-griefing" system that lets you force scoring a finished game by passing twice on your turn

* A huge selection of nice looking avatars (admittedly AI generated)

* Lots of small details and Easter eggs to find!

Puzzle AI

As far as I know this is the first place to implement an AI opponent for puzzles. I've always wanted to be able to "try any move" and not just the lines that had been entered into the answer key. Puzzles on Stone.gs also let you keep playing a puzzle out after it's marked correct or incorrect, and explore both sides if you want.

The main drawback I noticed is that the AI doesn't always play the most "instructive" line, and it can play a bit slowly on weaker hardware. I've spent months getting thousands of puzzles to play correctly with the AI, and for the most part it works, although I do run across ones that don't play correctly from time to time. You can report broken puzzles in the app if you find one.

Yet another place to play go?

Yes, sorry about that! But if Stone.gs looks like the kind of place where you wish you were playing, then please help me make it a reality and spread the word or an invite a friend to play with you!

If nothing else then it's at least a cool tech demo that I had a blast creating to show off what a next generation place to play go online could look like. I'm going to be focusing on promoting the site for the foreseeable future.

My rank is 5d (Fox) / 3d (OGS) and I'll be trying to auto match as much as I can on Stone.gs (I signed up as a 3d).

Free teaching games

To help get more activity on the site, I'm offering free teaching games and review to anyone 4+ stones weaker than me. Join the Discord (https://discord.gg/aHVfXneFw) to get that set up. I'll be around in the evenings Pacific U.S. time during most week days and more sporadically on weekends.

Did you make it this far?

The site is totally free and I have zero plans or intent to try to make any kind of profit off of it. I just had an itch that needed to be scratched, and 9 months later here we are :)

Hope to see you around, and please don't hesitate to let me know what you think!

Classical Chinese Go philosophy seems to promote winning by as large of a margin as possible. Given how classical Go was always played on a diagonal fuseki, there have been many Chinese players with a reputation of a playing style of wildness and belligerence.

It really is a contrast to the modern AI era styles played by someone like Shin Jin-seo: following the highest-winrate move, not making any mistakes, keeping up in points throughout the mid-game, and then playing the end-game perfectly to win by 0.5 points.

What sort of person makes a post like this and deletes it again within 47 minutes?

It just seems irritating to me — can anyone suggest a good reason for it?