Moyo Go Studio DevBlog

Since Moyo Go Studio is a nice, finished product - although not perfect by far of course -  I have decided to make it available for free. It’s available from the main page. I was still selling half a dozen copies a month so there must be some interest yet. Moyo Go works fine on 32-bit XP, and many people made it work on Vista and 7, also 64-bit. MS introduced many bugs after XP so look in the troubleshooting section and for chrissakes - turn off Defender and use a real antivirus program. Defender sometimes prevents MGS from running. Here is written how to fix installation issues. Also in the troubleshooting section of the “manual” section of my site. To be clear: Moyo Go works absolutely fine on Windows XP, Vista and Windows 7. Any issues are caused by wrong Windows settings, misbehaving 3rd party apps or other causes beyond my control. All those problems can be easily fixed.

This is the final release. Development work has ceased forever.

I hope you can put it to use!

I had to dash out 299 bucks for the latest version of Absolute Database, a single-file SQL database I use in Moyo Go. This to get the latest version with bugs fixed and slownesses sped up. And of course it compiles with the latest version of Delphi, something that can take weeks to achieve if you have to port those sources yourself.

Together with 250 bucks for the Automated Docking library, I have to sell 22 Moyo Go’s before I’m even again.. Come on guys, buy your copy now and as soon as I have something substantially new, I’ll email everyone who bought it over the past three years with a free update link. The others can also get a free update, but I lost their email addresses so they’ll have to stay posted here.

After 1000+ days not having worked on Moyo Go I’m ready to give it a go once more, slowly slowly, again. It will take forever before I got everything compiling again (800 000 lines compile now, of the 1 300 000 lines). But even when it compiles, it will not run properly due to all kinds of changes in the latest components, libraries and Delphi compiler.

It’s a long time that I did not post here, and a long time since I worked on Moyo Go (apart from totally cleaning up the database, unifying the spelling of player names etc.)

The last months I’ve seen a great increase in purchases (as in several per day) and, as I have said before, when Moyo Go starts selling really seriously, I will start working on it again.

This is not some empty promise - last week I’ve shelled out $250,- for the latest AutomatedQA docking library, so that it compiles with Delphi 2009. (I use Delphi 2009 now instead of Delphi 7.)
Moyo Go uses quite a few state-of-the-art commercial libraries because nothing is good enough for my baby :-)

It will take quite a while to let the program compile again, it’s 1 300 000 lines of code with all those huge libraries, but I’m getting there.
Anyone who has bought/will buy via PayPal will one day get an email with a download link to the latest version for free. But this will take quite a while.

If you bought Moyo Go from BMT Micro, then you should send me your email address so I can put you on the notification list.
The focus will lie on bugfixes and implementing some user suggestions.
And I’m playing again with the idea of making a TsumeGo module..

Amazing how it took more than half a decade for sales to take off - that’s the power of boycots - but you can’t stop word-of-mouth :-)

Moyo Go Studio now contains all games packs (separately downloadable).

It is highly recommended to use the extra games, because any Go game you play, regardless of your rank, contains many patterns that also occured in other games.

If you are a kyu-level player, you surely can benefit from seeing what a high-dan level player played in a similar local (tactical) situation.

This is a picture of the new computer I built.
It will be used for number-crunching.

I have a water cooling system, but I am worried one day a rupture will ruin the RAM, so I used fans instead.

The fan on CPU1 (a dual-core Opteron) had to be smaller because a bigger one simply didn’t fit.

The beast makes too much noise to keep it in the room so I put in in the cellar - nice and cold there. I remote it with Remote Desktop over WiFi, works great. You should see the looks of visitors when I show them, on the external monitor of my laptop, the “My Computer” properties of 64 GB RAM :-D

For those wondering about where to get a mobo with 16 DIMM slots: It’s the Iwill DK88. 64 GB is an expensive proposition - 14 kilobucks at the time of writing. Luckily, my company is an authorized hardware dealer, so I get stuff cheaper.

Remember I blogged about cleaning up alternatively-spelled Chinese and Korean names and such?

The result is finally included in the latest version of Moyo Go.

More than two thousand new pro games have been added as a bonus.

A good 2008 to you all!

Some days ago I received a bug report from Germany.

The issue: Moyo Go did not parse a SGF2MISC file properly and thought it contained illegal SGF. I found the cause and fixed it. This fix will be available in the “2008″ version (will still take a long time before that one will be released, I will stop selling the 2007 version several months before that - yes, shutdown all sales such as not to disappoint those who just bought the 2007 version).

Whilst doing that, I discovered a glitch in the ProHandicap database regarding adding new games, and fixed that one as well - it’s downloadable here.

(Unzip in the Moyo Go Studio root install folder.)

In a previous posting I mentioned Dariush’ pattern system, and how it was on a par with Moyo Go’s in terms of pro-prediction.

(But Moyo Go gives accurate statistical data on moves, Dariush doesn’t and there are many more big differences that make Dariush, in my opinion, not a serious competitor YET).

Of course I have many ideas on how to improve the pattern system, but I never bothered because it was the only pattern system in the world. This has changed and it’s time to do something about it.

It’s not neccessary to modify the pattern database itself or anything -the only thing that has to be improved is the “value” of the patterns. MGS uses 16,777,216 patterns (no idea how Dariush manages to squeeze a pattern in a single bit of memory, MGS uses 8 bytes). If it’s true that Dariush uses 60 million patterns and MGS almost four times less, then there is enormous improvement potential for the latter, as with almost 4 times more patterns, Dariush only gets about the same results as Moyo Go.

The key to improving MGS’s pattern system is to go back to my initial “learning” method. My initial learning method is the one that Microsoft copied after studying my previous blog and website. It’s called “Bayesian Learning” or something like that. The mathematics seem to be complex if one reads their paper, but I intuitively re-invented it and have no clue how the maths work. It provided great results but it took ages to finish, so I devised a very much faster method (hundreds of times faster), which yielded very good results too. I never compared the results of both methods but the Bayesian method, given enough time, will surely produce better results. I discarded it not only for its extreme slowness (months of number crunching), but also because it destroys the statistical data, harvested from the game records.

It seems, however, that not many care much about accurate statistical move percentages, and that a higher pro-prediction percentage might be nicer to have than accurate statistics. Dariush does not provide meaningful data on suggested moves (they appear to fake a percentage), and because they have about as strong a pro-prediction as MGS, I’ll see if I can outdo them, abandoning the statistical part of the pattern system. I could easily provide two versions, one with exact statistics and one without, but with better pro-prediction.

This is next on my to-do list, so I expect to report back about progress in a while. It will take a long time to crunch the data in a Bayesian way, but I expect the pattern system to get quite a bit stronger, especially because I have now tens of thousands of extra pro games to work with. The cool part is that I’ll include the Bayesian-cruncher as a part of the retail version of Moyo Go Studio, so that people can keep optimizing their own pattern database. (Because it may be that years of number crunching is required to achieve the optimum).

Translating the Chinese names took days of hard work, and I still didn’t manage to do the ones with morwe than 3 characters. I discovered that almost all names I had translated belonged to amateurs, so I later deleter more than a hundred games.

I found a couple of name lists on the web and used them for the auto-transliteration stage.

One thing Mace Lee already mentioned is that some Chinese-spelled names actually belong to Korean players, so the phonetic Chinese still needs to be matched to a slightly differently phoneticized Korean name. I am slowly learning the names of the well-known players..

I’ve been “SGF hunting” as well, making the net result of my efforts of the past weeks a net gain of around 1000 games, totalling some 49350 19×19 pro-pro games. After the illlustrious secret Nihon-Kin collection, easily the largest pro-game collection in the world. And pretty accurate too, after spending days of disambiguating alternatively-spelled names. That work is likely not completely finished yet (and I hope I did not make mistakes). GoBase lists AKA’s, but I hardly used them. The database looks very different now, with zero games that have only Chinese-spelled names and just a few games where one players’ name still is Chinese. And literally hundreds of slightly-differently-spelled names are now unified, making it finally practicable to search for a player and get ALL his/her games. I am making the search functions more robust too: Automatic substitution of the “normalized” name when you specify a known “misspelling”. For some players, Moyo Go will know over ten alternative spellings, and that’s excluding the Chinese ones!

About the new SGF collection: It’s being exported as SGF’s now. For some reason that takes 20 hours or so, no idea why the SQL database I use is so sluggish with compressed fields. They aren’t even encrypted, for crying out loud.

Another feature I’m making for MoyoGo 2008 is the automatic display of the Gobase biography of a player when you right-click the name. I bet that this feature will become standard in all serious Go software.

For those who are still reading: Do you think I should make that game database a free download? Because even though I am at the receiving end of a lifelong boycot for all and any Go products I will ever make due to me using previously commercialized game records, I still believe game records should be free as in -speech.

I realize that it’s hardly a groundbreaking feature, but I have taken to translating those players’ names that are not yet done. I do Google searches on their Chinese names, and search for English pages only. When I find at least two sites that state them with the same name, I use it, otherwise I use Google Trans - that works just fine because Chinese names are not like “Johnny Vanderbildt” but they are a string of sounds, literally and phonetically represented by their characters. And in case of names, you are only interested in the transliterated representation of the sound, latinized in a standardized way.

The result will be the largest latinized game database available. I hope that nobody will steal it ;-)

Someone told me that the game packs he paid for & downloaded don’t install properly. Turns out I used the wrong setup files. That’s what happens when you migrate stuff you haven’t worked on in over a year to a different computer and don’t test rigorously..

Three people have bought game packs (two in the US and one in Israel) and I am burning a DVD for them as we speak, with nice Moyo Go printings and all available update packs to make up for the delay. I am sending it by express airmail.

All is now fixed, the corrected and tested setups have been uploaded to the web-shop.

I thought I’d use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_players to enlarge Moyo Go’s automatic Asian-to-English spelling converter. Well, that’s useless, because the Wikipedia article is full of blatant errors:

Look behind the name of Yasuro Kikuchi. You know what the Japanese name between braces is? “Kato Tomoko”! The link to Yasuro’s page has his correct name.

Funny how someone like myself, total outcast in the Western Go world due to boycots, not a Go player and not able to read any SE-Asian language, has to fix the errors in Wikipedia articles on Go players. Someone is actually doing his homework here.

Remember my post about the duplicate Korean names due to non-uniform spelling?

Here is part of a list of players that have games in MasterGo’s database: (MasterGo must bear the brunt today because AGA’s webmaster is also the programmer of MasterGo and Slate & Shell is the company of AGA’s leadership, and AGA is boycotting Moyo Go Studio).

All nonsense. Chen Delong and Chen Dilong don’t exist. Hence their meagre number of games. The dude is called Chen Qiulong. The same with Chen Huifeng. No such player. His name is Chen Huifang.

I’m cleaning up this shit now, including the shit of those people who’s game records I “stole”. Nobody else is doing it, because it’s too much work. I have been working on this for days already, and the end is not in sight. I have to look up all names that seem ambiguous and verify that there indeed exist two different Go players with indeed those generally accepted transliterations of their name. And if not, I have to obtain a high degree of certainty that they are in fact the same name. This requires multiple Googlings per name, and we’re talking about hundreds of dodgy names here.

So here I am: I don’t even speak any SE-Asian languages or play Go for that matter, reviled and ostracized by AGA, Sensei’s Library, the BGA and GoBase - putting another few dozen hours into cleaning up the mess of player-fragmentation. I am amazed that this work has never been done! It might be that only GoGoD and GoBase ensure the uniformity of player’s names, but it seems that no Go software except Moyo Go Studio cares about this issue.

I often watch documentaries when I am waiting for something to finish crunching. Here is one of the most interesting things I have watched in a few years, and I watch about a thousand documentaries a year. It is hard to follow for folks without some basis in electronics, but it is an excellent explanation of how electronics really work. Plus the best explanation of the core of Tesla’s work. Almost half an hour into the “lecture”, Tom mentions that the Tunguska event in fact was caused by Tesla. I believe him, as Tesla mentioned to some polar explorers to watch the sky that day, because he would give them a “sign”. The Tungushka event happened simultaneously with Tesla’s Wardenclyffe demonstration.

Later (around 36 minutes) he mentions Zero Point Energy, something the Dutch scientist Casimir (the Casimir effect) has proven to be real. What we learn in school about wave theory is only half of the picture. About an hour into the monologue, Bearden becomes too controversial even for me.

While I am making a name filter for the pattern results (example patterns, Fuseki and “Kombilo” patterns), I discovered that a lot of pro games have alternate spellings:

Pak Yeong-ch’an
Pak Cheong-sang

Is this one and the same person or not? If so, which spelling is preferrable? I am fixing this problem as we speak:

This is the socalled “McCune-Reischauer form”, a standard to spell Korean names. The best feature will be that deviating spellings will automatically be normalized, when entered, doing a SQL database search. So even if you don’t know the proper name, it will still work.

I found game records for Seo Nung-uk, Seo Neung-wook, Seo Nung-wook, So Nung-wook, Suh Neung-wook, Suh Nung-wook, Seo Neung-uk, Seo Neung Uk and Seo Nungwuk. In fact the preferred spelling for the name of this very same person is Seo Neung-uk.

A serious Go study tool can’t be without automatic normalization of player’s names, how would you otherwise be able to study (filter on) the style and statistics of a certain player?

Dariush has been shouting that it has a better pattern system than Moyo Go, so since I decided to start working on the program again, I had a look at Dariush. It is easy to make critical comments about the look & feel and functionality of that software, but that might be unfair, as I have no idea how long they have been working on it. The pattern system is what I was afraid of - and so I should be:

I took the first game in one of my SGF folders marked “Cyberkiwon 7d”. I have the folders a through z there, with numbered games in them. The first game was numbered 9, and the file is here. The strongest Cyberkiwon games are often played by pro’s, and statistical analysis shows hat most games in that category use pro Joseki.

Of that 126-move game, Dariush predicted 55 moves correctly, Moyo Go 54. You can try it yourself and let us know here if you found a mistake.

This (statistically insignificant) result does not daunt me. On the contrary. Darius obviously has a much less sophisticated pattern system than Moyo Go has (when I look at which info is obviously in its patterns and even the size of its pattern database). So there must be something very important the Dariush dudes have implemented, and Moyo Go didn’t implement that at all. So if I figure out, using some detective work, what that crucial difference is the programmers of Dariush “got”, and I didn’t get, then wham, Moyo Go will be the undisputed leader again.

I am excited because I already think I got it. I think I know what Dariush has, in its pattern system, that Moyo Go hasn’t. It is obvious, when replaying 9.sgf in both programs. (On a tangent: I think Moyo Go actually outperforms Dariush here, because where some moves are not at all considered by Dariush, Moyo Go actually classifies them as the second-best choice, then again I haven’t counted how often that happens with both programs). And Darius, contrary to Moyo Go, does not give statisticaly sound move estimations, but hey, as long as the moves are good :-)

Anyway. I think that Dariush (it seems obvious when you observe its pattern classifications) greatly emphasises locality. Computer Go researchers are divided over whether locality should be used in a move-suggestion system, but Erik van der Werff seems to use it to good effect. And now Dariush too, it seems. If this is really true, if locality plays a role in move prediction, then adding it to Moyo Go should give it a crushing ahead to Dariush.

I have once talked about locality in move prediction with Michael Reiss. We both thought it was “sinful”, bad, unscientific, etc. But first Erik, and now Dariush, hm..

You see, competition is good. One of the first things I’m gonna do is to add locality to Moyo Go’s pattern system, and test it.

I’ll be back.

Some customers are not very happy that I promised them free bugfix releases an am now reneging on that promise.
I’ll see what I can do. One of the main problems (the only really big problem, perhaps) is downwards compatibility with the databases. When I add fields to the databases, the bugfix release should somehow downgrade its available feature set. That is such a can of worms that I don’t want to go there. Not to mention the need to either let people export all their games and re-import them in order to rebuild the database to its new format, or to redistribute the Gigabyte of game databases for free.

The problem with the first alternative is that importing all 450 000 games would take over a week, on the average PC. The problem with the last alternative is how to get 2 GB of the latest databases to hundreds of people, without providing access to those tenthousand users of the free version. These huge databases really are a problem. In order for the program to have such an unique pattern capability (there are rumors of another program being “better” but I believe it when I see it, at least it has not half a million example games like Moyo Go has), the importing process is relatively slow at about a game a second. You can redistribute the SGF’s as 7zip files, but you can’t expect a 125-hour importing process to go well, especially not because the larger the database, the more RAM required for the importing process (up to 1 GB free RAM, and RAM only, not pages on disk).

Sometimes I hear complaints on how slow Moyo Go is. That always enrages me :-)

Because Moyo Go is not slow. On the contrary, it is incredibly fast. The tricks used to get it so fast are so complex, that at the moment I don’t remember how half of them work, and I have to reverse-engineer them from the (comments in the) source.

So whence those occasional claims of totally-unusable slowliness? They are few but they exist and I take them seriously.

First of all, by all means ensure that there is at least 350 MB free for the program. If you have a machine with 512 MB and you run nothing else but Moyo Go, it still doesn’t mean there is 350 MB free. What you should do is Start - Run and type msconfig. On the Startup tab are usually a large number of totally useless applications, starting up with Windows. They come with the soundcard installer, with Adobe Acrobat etc. get rid of that crap - they use RAM. If you don’t know what something does, Google it or see what happens when you disable it.

A way to see how much memory running processes use is CTRL + SHIFT + ESC, and go to the Processes tab. Then View - Select Columns and choose Memory (working set). Then you’ll notice (as I now do) that Firefox likes to claim 350 whopping megabytes at the moment, on my machine!

When you’ve eliminated memory-starvation problems, go on to another very important issue: Bad NVIDIA screen card drivers. They are the single most common reason for slowing down Moyo Go. Update that driver. I had half a dozen customers who had their slowdown problem disappear that way.

Now we come to the game-import process. Again, this should be fairly quick with a limited number of games. When it isn’t, it is most likely an antivirus scanner. Moyo Go creates 4096 temporary files before it imports games. A virus scan of so many files can add a minute or more, perhaps, to the import process. You can temporarily disable a virus scanner to see if it makes any difference.

I just realized that the game packs for sale for just a few dollars (Tygem, IGS, NNGS, Cyberkiwon, KGS) should also work on the now-discontinued free version!

If that means that those tenthousand people who downloaded the free version, will now each spend 5 bucks on some games, I’ll be rich (I’ll get about half).

Moyo Go currently does not have a way to export all its SGF games in one go. You can export them very easily one-by on though.

I decided not to built in limitations (SmartGo has to be re-started every ten games you export).

A few people asked me for a feature that exports all games, and I am reluctant to provide it, because exporting all games takes ages. The games are heavily compressed in a database, and exporting them would go with ten games a second on a fast PC. I can’t really see what the use of all those games is, if you already own Moyo Go Studio, with a queryable SQL database, a “Kombilo” pattern searcher, an SGF annotation program and all the rest.

Of course it is very interesting for me to know why one would want to use those games in another program, because I will react by adding the features of that program to Moyo Go!

Meanwhile, I am now exporting all games from a Moyo Go install to SGF, because I had thrown away all my SGF’s, because those 450 000 SGF’s occupied 1.75 GB. I could have kept them but as I mentioned before, in a bout of anger I got rid of everything. Using R-Studio to recover the SGF’s is not an option due to the sheer number of SGF’s, and the fact that they have non-descriptive names. I need to be able to know from which Go server they came from, and R-Studio will not give me their parent folders’ name, only files grouped by file extension. Using a modified Moyo Go build to export the games, this still takes a waking day on a very fast machine. I have not much to say about the exporting speed because I use a third-party SQL database source code licence for the game data for practical reasons: Writing a state-of-the-art SQL database system takes a few years.

The reason I need those raw SGF’s is that I want to add a feature to Moyo Go that neccessitates altering its database fields. I need to add a way to quickly (!) filter on player’s name. Not in the SQL database, but in the example (”learned”) pattern database. When moving over the board, you see patterns and the system spits out the games in which they occur with a speed of tens of thousands a second. What I need to add is a way to get only Go Seigen’s games, etc. But it should not make the retrieval speed slower. That’s really hard to do. I tried it twice already. Yesterday I concluded that the only way to do it is a little comp-sci trick. So I’ll have to build it and re-import the SGF’s.

But that trick changes a database format. In case of free updates, I would have to redistribute 1.5 GB worth of databases to customers. Not very practical. Having only one (major) update a year for not too high of a price solves this problem, at least for the pro games.

I finally found a webshop that let me upload 1.5 GB worth of files. BMT Micro has just about the best reputation, so I’m happy.

Moyo Go with just the pro games is significantly cheaper (especially in Euro’s) than before, but all game packs included, the software hits 94 USD, and if you want it sent to you by BMT Micro on a DVD, it’s 10 bucks extra. I’m done with free demo’s and asking prices that give a wrong impression of the software.

The webshop is here: http://www.moyogo.com/buy.htm

At the final checkout option (click the “checkout” button) there is an option for a physical CD/DVD by US mail:

I am interested in the download speed, if you buy something, let me know. The largest file is the main program, a whopping 308 MB. Still, on a typical 4 mbit ADSL line it should take no more than 15 minutes to download. You’ll have 31 days to download a file, so if it fails for some reason - no worries.

I think that you can only make really good software when you use it yourself. They call it “eating your own dogfood”.

Initially, I focused a lot on the technical aspects of the software, like superfast pattern recognition, and that those patterns were indeed relevant. I could do that with just programming skills, because it is possible to use harvested Go patterns to predict pro moves, thereby avoiding the need to become a Go player myself.

A long time ago (around 1988), my job was to design electrotechnical installations. We used a 2D CAD program by Rotring, and it sucked. So I borrowed ten thousand bucks and bought an Acorn Archimedes, a multisync monitor and an A3 plotter. Two years later I had a CAD system for the electrotechnical industry that was ripe for sale. Not because I was a CAD expert, but because after one year into its development, we dumped Rotring’s system and used mine instead. So I was forced to do my daily design work on my own CAD system. Nothing concentrates the mind better :-)

Seen the success of eating my own dogfood, I was thinking to learn to play Go online (I already planned to do that before). Some lessons and some online play. I am still a bit apprehensive to do that though, but I’ll have to jump in one day soon. I think that when I will use my own software to print Kifu’s and replay games, that I will find a billion annoyances that just have to be fixed ASAP. And that this will lead to a very much improved user experience. I think this is why SmartGo still is a scary competitor. All those programmers actually play Go themselves. I think Moyo Go Studio can not survive, long-term, without me spending some serious time on actually playing and studying Go myself. Actually using the software.

This is a dilemma, spending time playing Go versus working on the software. Because I can still improve the program without possessing the slightest Go skills. One of the things I want to make is filtering of pattern search results, so that you can get only the players you’re interested in. This has been requested a lot. But if I want to take this software seriously, I have to become a regular Go player myself, there is no way around the paradigm of Eating Your Own Dogfood. Otherwise there will be a communication gap between me and the customers.

The good thing is that I like to play mind games (I was an avid Chess player before) and that Go appeals to me. I played a dozen or so games and I improved rapidly and I liked it. With a much more relaxed release schedule (once or twice a year), it seems that I can divide my time more sensibly between programming for Go players and playing Go myself.

It pays off to be a data-salvage guy (I started a PC-repair shop at the beginning of this year).

In a bout of frustration, after not having coded on Moyo Go for almost a year, I had deleted its files because they took a lot of space. Not just the sources, especially all kinds of miscellaneous stuff like a million SGF’s and all kinds of other things. I had hundreds of Go-abstracts, board textures, pre-compiled databases, setup scripts and enormous pattern database files. But I mainly deleted them out of sheer spite. It’s not easy, to work thousands of hours in the best years of your life on something, only to discover that there is no way in hell anyone will ever put up a review on any well-visited Go site. AGA rejects all non-negative reviews for Moyo Go Studio, not to mention Sensei’s Library, where all mention of it is forbidden. And Gobase and the BGA pretend the software doesn’t exist.

I was very rigorous getting rid of it all: For example I had been working for months on a TsumeGo solver, I had coded a super-efficient move engine and I spent a few days designing a way to speed it up even more. I hand-drew a large sheet of complex binary matrices that would have to be hardcoded to be able to replace a lot of IF’s with a lookup table. All that work is gone now. I threw away some twenty kilo worth of computer-Go related material, and used the folders for day-to-day accounting of the PC-help shop.

Anyway - I have the code back (it appears to be the latest code but I am not sure yet) and all it took was a round of R-Studio. R-Studio is the data-recovery software I use for folks that have reformatted their disks and then they discover that they forgot to backup their wedding pictures. After R-Studio did its work, it still took me four days to get the sources to compile on my new laptop. At age 41 (I’ll be 42 in 5 days), it is my first laptop. I bought a cheap one: The HP 530. No fuel cell or Flash “disk” because things move slowly in computerland. I’m very glad with it, it hardly makes any noise.

I mentioned before that Google offered me a job.
Well, I am not so sure about that. In fact I think they were spamming.

See, Google has no problem harvesting email addy’s of potentially interesting programmers. They sent me this:

This screams “SPAM!”, for a plethora of reasons.
It’s obviously a pastejob, with lost whitespace and a premature newline. A typo to make it look like a casual email. And zero details, totally generic. Could have been sent to any coder.
So I told them that I thought it was SPAM, but that since I wasn’t 100% sure, I just wanted to say I wasn’t interested.

As one of my coding colleagues put it: “I hope you told them to shove a fork up their ass?”.

This came back (I don’t include the rest, which was pretty uninteresting, more generic stuff about whom I should contact at Google for further “potential opportunities”).

So now we know for sure, Google is indeed spamming for coders.
Note the premature newline, just like the initial message.
So they get a lot of complaints about SPAM, and they have a canned response to that as well, LOL.

I’m continuing Moyo Go’s development.

Since I haven’t been working on it for almost a year I had emotionally distantiated myself from the project, and having found other employments, I thought it was better to let the project bleed to death, seen the comprehensive censorship on Sensei’s Library (from the same country as Hitler) and the AGA/BGA crusader duo (from the countries that brought us WW III). Let’s not mention GoBase, as GoBase is a direct competitor and has trivialized itself anyway. But a very positive thing is that GoDiscussions does not censor the product, even though some moderators like to block threads where the boycots are discussed. *

When I announced to stop selling Moyo Go, I was astonished to receive a dozen of emails in my support - amazingly, many were still visiting this site after almost a year of inactivity.

Even better, I received a handful of purchase requests (I denied them all because I had used my development PC for my new PC-repair business as a data-salvage station, and my main computer is a laptop now because it doesn’t make as much noise as that enormous quad Opteron server I used for data-crunching).

So I will continue - with a new business model:

- Instant download of the product after purchase
- Purchase price of the core product (with just pro games) about half of what it was before (well, in Euro’s because the USD suffered a terrible inflation over the past year)
- No weekly pro games by email any more
- No free updates any more
- Yearly releases of major new versions
- Existing customers pay the same for new versions

I regret I won’t be able to provide my existing customers with weekly emails with new pro games and free software updates any more. With the sales figures I have now (due to the boycots), I had the choice of folding or doing it this way.

At least I have reverted my decision to abandon the product, meaning that one will be able to get future updates for a modest price, instead of owning a “dead” product. I think it is a good compromise, especially now I know that at least the Western Go community is a bunch of cowardly sheeple with an unhealty respect for the wrong authorities. I have been sorely disappointed by them - my bad for imagining that they would somehow be more ethical, intelligent or brave than the average human being.

* The boycotters say they censor Moyo Go Studio because it contains a few thousand games that others offered first and that this is an unforgivable breech of ethics, I say they organized boycots because Moyo Go forms a threat to their financial interests of monopolizing the world’s Go games and profiting indefinately from them. Some (Arno Hollosi) admit that they boycot me because they just don’t like me - making it petty power-politics of personal preference - even more pathetic.