Moyo Go Studio DevBlog

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.