"The Many Faces of Go" is the 2002 World Computer Go Champion, 1998 World Computer Go Champion, and ten time US Computer Go Champion. It is one of the strongest Computer Go opponents in the world, and has many other great features including an integrated IGS client so you can play on the internet. A sophisticated set of go problems and a Joseki tutor help you improve your game.

System requirements: IBM-PC or compatible, Pentium or faster, Windows 95, 98, ME, NT, XP, or 2000, 64 MB main memory. 32 MB hard disk.

Buy or upgrade The Many Faces of Go

Download a free 9x9 go program based on The Many Faces of Go.

Major New Features in Version 11

• Stronger go player, especially at life and death reading.
• Sound
• Much better go problems
• Internet Go Client
• Game score graph
• ctrl-click to go directly to a move
• Rotate the go board
• Much better computer problem solver
• More commented games

Version 11 Features:

• Great graphics. Beautiful and adjustable 3-D slate and clamshell stones with shadows, and realistic wood grain. You can rotate the board, or add coordinates. Won the "Best Design" award at the 1991 World Computer Go Championship.
• Sound. Realistic clicks and capture sounds, and sounds for pass, IGS match, etc.
• Strong go player. 10 levels of play, from about 20 Kyu to about 8 kyu. 1998 World Computer Go Champion.
• Go tutorial. Over 100 screens of text, examples, and simple problems teach you the rules, elementary tactics and strategies.
• Go problems. Over 2000 go problems for all levels of player. The program selects problems for you based on your strength, and tracks your strength as you solve them. Problems appear in different orientations and colors to aid learning. Go problems can be upated over the internet, and it is easy for you to add additional problems or problem sets.
• Play go on the Internet. An Internet Go Server is built in so you can play go on the internet with the familiar Many Faces interface, and use its powerful editing features to comment your games.
• Move suggestions. At each move it can show suggestions for next move, by category (such as attacking, invading, endgame, etc). Can also show liberty counts and/or group strengths for all groups. The computer can show its lookahead while it is thinking.
• Game Score Graph. Graph your score at each move. Click on a move to go to that position.
• Move hints. Suggests your best move.
• Move explanations. Can explain why it made a move or suggested a move for you.
• Computer solving of go problems. The computer can solve life and death problems in yor games to help you improve.
• Thousands of games to play through. Hundreds of professional games with commentary. About a thousand uncommented professional game records, organized by tournament. About a thousand commented amateur games from the Go Teaching Ladder. Over 4,000 uncommented very strong amateur games.
• Powerful Game Editor. Can present for review any game in the standard Ishi format (.go) or the popular Smart Game Format (.sgf). When reviewing a game you can try to guess the next move. A wide variety of marks are supported. You can add commentary or variations. Use ctrl-click to move directly to any move in the game. Insert, delete, or drag stones to new positions. Great for recording your own games for later study.
• Can play and score using all major rule sets (Japanese, Chinese, GOE, and American).
• Can play either color, or serve as an electronic go board for two people.
• Can give or receive a handicap.
• Fuseki Libraries. Libraries of opening sequences on the whole board from professional games. At each position, shows the popularity of each next move. Two libraries are included, one which includes all moves from about 5700 professional games, and one which includes an additional 29,000 strong amateur games.
• Joseki Tutor. Over 45,000 move library of standard corner sequences is available for browsing or testing. Includes joseki, near-joseki, trick plays, and responses to many bad moves. Use it to look up variations, or to test your joseki knowledge.
• Play by modem. Uses the Computer Go standard modem protocol for play with any other go program that supports this protocol. Either player can make moves for either color,allowing discussion or teaching games. Players can type messages to each other during the game.
• Printing of go diagrams or full games with numbered moves.
• On-line manual with information on history, tournaments, professionals, etc.

Version 10 Features:

• Great graphics. Beautiful 3-D slate and clamshell stones with shadows, and realistic wood grain. The prior user interface won the "Best Design" award at the 1991 World Computer Go Championship.
• Strong go player. 10 levels of play, from about 20 Kyu to about 8 kyu. 1998 World Computer Go Champion.
• Go tutorial. Over 100 screens of text, examples, and simple problems teach you the rules, elementary tactics and strategies.
• Go problems. All (over 200) problems from the Ishi Press book, "Graded Go Problems for Beginners, Vol I." Ideal problem set for beginners.
• Move suggestions. At each move it can show suggestions for next move, by category (such as attacking, invading, endgame, etc). Can also show liberty counts and/or group strengths for all groups.
• Move hints. Suggests your best move.
• Move explanations. Can explain why it made a move or suggested a move for you.
• Hundreds of professional games with commentary.
• About a thousand uncommented professional game records, organized by tournament.
• Can present for review any game in the standard Ishi format (.go) or the popular Smart Game Format (.sgf). When reviewing a game you can try to guess the next move.
• Can show its lookahead while it is thinking.
• Can play and score using all major rule sets (Japanese, Chinese, GOE, and American).
• Can play either color, or serve as an electronic go board for two people.
• Can give or receive a handicap.
• Fuseki Libraries. Libraries of opening sequences on the whole board from professional games. At each position, shows the popularity of each next move. Two libraries are included, one which includes all moves from about 5700 professional games, and one which includes an additional 29,000 strong amateur games.
• Joseki Tutor. Over 45,000 move library of standard corner sequences is availble for browsing or testing. Includes joseki, near-joseki, trick plays, and responses to many bad moves. Use it to look up variations, or to test your joseki knowledge.
• Game editor. Enter comments and variations, put marks on the board, insert, delete, or drag stones to correct mistakes, etc. Great for recording your own games for later study.
• Play by modem. Uses the Computer Go standard modem protocol for play with any other go program that supports this protocol. Either player can make moves for either color, allowing discussion or teaching games. Players can type messages to each other during the game.
• Computer solving of go problems.
• Create your own go problem sets.
• Printing of go diagrams.
• On-line manual with information on history, tournaments, professionals, etc.
• Includes a shareware client for Internet Go Servers (TgWin). (Which you should register if you use.)
• Over 40,000 strong amateur game records are included on the CD-ROM (but not playable from the CD-ROM).

Read a review of version 10.

How To Buy It

The most recent computer go engine (11.0) is available in Japan, as "AI IGO", with a Japanese user interface for Windows or Macintosh. This is one of the best selling go programs in Japan.

You can play against "The Many Faces of Go" on the internet at IGS or NNGS. It uses the name "ManyFaces" on both servers. The version on IGS might talk to you. Give it a try. It can also remember simple facts and repeat them.

Rating

Go ratings for amateurs are on a scale that starts around 25 Kyu for beginners, goes to 1 kyu, then 1 dan, then 6 dan or so for the strongest players. Most people who are serious about studying the game, and have stronger players to play with, can get to 10 kyu in about a year, and 1 dan in 3 to 5 years. American (AGA), Japanese, and NNGS ratings are a little weaker than ratings in China, Taiwan, Korea, Europe, and IGS.

Go programs are hard to rate accurately, since they each have areas of strength, and other areas of weakness compared to people. So far no one has made a go program that can learn from its mistakes, so once someone has played a few games against a program, they can change the handicap against it by several stones.

Many Faces of Go has a 6 Kyu diploma from the Japanese Nihon-Ki-in, based on test games against rated Japanese players and some sample play against a 9-dan professional.

Many Faces maintains a rank of around 10 Kyu on NNGS, based on hundreds of games against many different players.

Known Bugs, Incompatibilities, and issues in Version 11.0

• None so far.

Known Bugs, Incompatibilities, and issues in Version 10.0

• On some Windows-NT machines the 256 color graphics don't work, so the game appears in only 16 colors. A patch is available to fix this bug. Download it here.
• If you add commentary to a move, then immediately try to guess the next move and guess wrong, the commentary is lost. To work around, after adding commentary, just go back a move then forward again before guessing the next move.
• On slower machines level 10 is very slow. I recomend using level 9, which is the level I use in tournaments. Level 9 is very close in strength to level 10, and much faster.
• You can't play the amateur games directly from the CD-ROM. If you install them to an uncompressed hard drive, they use over 100 MB of space on the drive (over 1 GB on some drives!). This is a problem with the way the Windows-95 files system handles small files on large disk drives. Windows-98 and Windows-NT store these files in much less disk space. On windows-95, if you install them to a compressed drive or Zip drive, they use much less disk space.

Popular suggestions for future versions. No guarantees that any of these will be in the next version, but this is what I am thinking about working on.

• Stronger go engine - I will do this for sure.
• Much bigger joseki library from japanese joseki dictionary.
• More pro games, especially from Korea.
• Add context menus for right button mouse clicks.

Older Versions

• Between 1981 and 1987, various versions were given away free to friends, running on HP-1000, Vax, and PA-RISC. An old HP-UX free version is still available on some web sites, called xgo.
• September, 1988. Cosmos, the Computer Go Partner for the IBM-PC. One upgrade version of Cosmos was released in 1990.
• The source code for the final version of Cosmos was given to the Spec benchmark committee, and is now 099.GO, one of the SpecInt95 benchmark suite. Hundreds of compiler writers around the world are tuning their compilers to make my go program run faster :-) Spec's description of the program.
• The Many Faces of Go had four earlier releases (7.0x, 8.0x, 9.0x, and 10.0)
• Igowin is a free 9x9 only Windows-95/98/NT version of Many Faces of Go, that plays fast, tracks your go strength as you improve, and learns from its mistakes so it never loses the same way twice. It includes the full Many Faces of Go tutorial, and an on-line manual with lots of information about the game. Download it here.
• Igo was a 9x9 only DOS version of Many Faces of Go, with a deliberately dumber engine. It includes the Go tutorial from The Many Faces of Go, and has the same great graphics. It is free, and intended to help beginners learn the game.
• Go simulator was a version of the first release of The Many Faces of Go, released in Europe with a 3 language manual and box.
• An early version of The Many Faces of Go was sold in Korea, with a Korean box and manual.
• A version for EO and Intel Penpoint OS handheld computers.
• Go programs based on the Many Faces of Go engine are on sale in Japan and Korea, for IBM-PC, Mac, and Sony Playstation.

Other Information About The Many Faces of Go

• World Computer Go Tournaments and Results.
• US Computer Go Tournament results.
• European Computer Go Tournament results.
• The Computer Go Ladder.
• Many Faces' NNGS rating graph.
• Many Faces Biography and History.
• The Standard Computer Go Modem Protocol
• Knowledge Representation in The Many Faces of Go

Other Computer go pages

• Lots of computer go information at the American Go Association.
• Lots of computer go information.
• Excellent paper on Computer Go by Jay Burmeister.
• Computer-go mailing list and archives.

Game Pages

• Mind Sports Olympiad Worldwide - Bringing Brains Together!"