KGSPlans/ Discussion

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Go back

anon: I miss the go back in demo games feature a lot, because as a weaker player you sometimes forget the last moves. So it's convenient to check the move sequence that lead to the current situation. I miss it even more if the 'teacher' (the guy having control) says something like 'this ko was set up 3 moves ago'.
So if possible, I vote for re-enabling this feature.

Hu: I would like to see it too. And disabling chat while "gone back" seems reasonable too.

Here is a related wish that may be suitable for transferring to the wishlist but is hardly even halfbaked: When teaching or reviewing, often the student or observers want to make a remark and have it attached to a particular move such as the last one paused at. However, the teacher often moves the focus before or just as the Enter key is pressed, so that the remark ends up attached to some other move, possibly an inappropriate move. I've thought about asking students to type a period to get my attention to give them control or a number to indicate a move to jump to so they can type the remark, but it could be cumbersome.

So it occurs to me in context of the "go back" issue being discussed that perhaps the student could "go back", attach the comment to the appropriate move, and have a "pending remark" button appear on the teacher's board that when pressed goes back to the move and makes the comment appear. Perhaps a ghost marker could appear in the Editing tools whenever the student is out of sync with the teacher.

The whole student teacher interaction could make even more interactive than currently by using schema such as these proposed here. WMS, you have already suggested some improvements such as having questions and remarks be filtered by the teacher or a moderator. Others have proposed ideas like drawing lines or shading on the board, and though there are SGF issues with that, it might lead to some productive avenues for increasing the already high level of pedagogical usefulness of the client. Some out of the box thinking could generate some interesting ideas and then some could be adapted into CGoban2 with modest effort.

The CGoban2 client can be used for real-time interaction but it can also be used offline as an editor to build a carefully crafted and commented tree for presentation back online. (I'm still hoping for Directed Acyclic Graphs!) It would be great to be able to edit and craft such SGF files interactively and cooperatively online.

One of the things about KGS that gives me the greatest pleasure is the wonderful interactivity of the teaching / review / demo capability, and I would be thrilled to see that developed to an even higher degree. -- Hu

Betting

axd: I think that Go should not be mixed in any way with betting related activities. (Makes me think of some Poker players, that won't play Poker if there is no real money involved.) I think the game is already rich enough, players should concentrate on strategy and tactics, not probabilities. That's for saloons.

(Sebastian:) When I read your comment, my first impression was that you generally oppose contemplating probability in Go. But I now see your point. “Play money” sounds a bit tacky. Bringing real money into the game (or even requiring it, as in your example!) would indeed smack of a saloon. But I think that the difference between play money and real money is clear (just imagine paying with play money in a saloon!), and I don't see any moral issue about betting per se. Money has given betting a bad reputation; maybe he could call it something else than “play money”.

Another possible confusion is that wms wrote “let players bet”. I’m not sure which of the following he meant:

  • Players can bet on their own game (like the doubling in backgammon). This could help encourage people to resign games in which they have no chance of winning and reward winners of games in which the upper hand changed often. But I doubt that’s what he meant.

axd: people that do not have the courage to resign have to learn more about the game (such as when to resign), rather than place bets

axd: I wonder if "studying" is still appropriate in this gambling (as I call it) context. I would think that the idea is (try) to master (read: understand) the game, not to win a maximum of points. And what about bluff? All these elements stain the game. There is already enough thrill in the game.

  • Kibitzes can bet. In that case, players wouldn’t have to be bothered by it. In fact, they should not even know when and what kibitzes bet on their moves. Games should still remain pure for the players.

Or do you oppose it because you have other wishes you'd rather see implemented? So do I. But if wms loves implementing it, it will be fun to give it a try. It certainly has potential.

axd: I personally have my doubts about the moral issues around betting (in whatever form). But indeed, there are also far more essential issues to deal with rather than introduce gambling as a game variant. Maybe wms might better first describe it in the variants pages. I bet there are more interesting Go variants to implement than this one...

Warp: I think that at least a feature where you can guess the next move (as has been proposed elsewhere) would be cool, even if it's not a betting system where you can win or lose something. Currently kibitz windows are sometimes flooded with people guessing the next move, and it would be nice if they could do that on the board instead of in the kibitz window (that is, people who have enabled the viewing of people's guesses would see numbers on the intersections of the board, ie how many people have guessed that intersection in particular; intersections with no guesses should not have any number, of course).

  • DrStraw problem with this is that it would deny a lot of people the ego boost from visibly claiming that they guessed what move a 6d was going to make.

Peterius: Environmental Go is a sort of form of Go betting that could be added to KGS if the mood struck. At the beginning of the game there are these numbered tickets, one for each number I guess. At each turn, a player may choose to take a ticket for that ticket's amount of points instead of playing. So the point is that it helps one to develop efficiency. There are only so many tickets so one has to constantly determine what a move might be worth or whether they should just take a ticket. Personally, I'm a classical kind of person and like just plain Go, but its an interesting variant nonetheless.

Harleqin: wms is very reluctant in other fields to add any more complexity to the system. I find it very surprising that apparently there are no such considerations hindering this (imho) useless addon.

Tamsin: At the risk of sounding like I just don't know when to give in: wouldn't it be more popular (and no more difficult) to make Fischer time instead of adding a "play money" feature? Fischer time = a good idea that a lot of people want; play money = a dubious one that has not been cried for by many users.

wms, please don't be hard on me for saying the above, as I know that you're not keen on Fischer time and have said you're not going to do it, and we all respect that, but you've also shown that you're a reasonable guy who listens to the punters, so at least please allow us Fischer-time-afficionados to hope that maybe some time you'll change your mind. Thanks.

Also, a more personal point, it's already hard enough to find games at time limits that I enjoy, without having to find out that people are going to begin refusing games because I don't wish to bet on them. And doesn't the ranking system kind of already constitute a form of play money? If you win, you get more ratings points and the benefit of a higher rank and getting to play with more skilful players.

SirLyric: As much fun as playing BangNeki would be, with spectators betting on high-level games and all sorts of other stuff, intuition tells me that this sort of activity will only disrupt the spirit of KGS, and it feels like a poor idea to me.


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