klay

About me

You can find me on KGS at the handle klayzen. I made 1d after about 550-600 games. Since then, i've gone to china with the Go 'n Games trip and improved to ...3d, in the new KGS rankings. It's 4d AGA now, i think.

Apparently I have a ShusakuNumber of 5 and a Go Seigen number of 3. An interesting oddity is that all of the games making up that number were played in real life, not online.

We've started a go club at Virginia Tech! Do stop in if you have a chance. Meeting thursdays, at http://www.vtgo.org.vt.edu/

Aaand... we've renewed a go club at Cornell! Do stop in if you have a chance. Meeting thursdays...website to come

Go and Entropy

Go is an excellent example of a pure information system. At the beginning of the game, before any stone is played, the entropy of the system is at its highest -- each point is equally likely to end up black or white. As players choose moves, they add information to the system: each point is no longer equally likely to be either color's territory. Even with a very limited grammar (only two colors on a finite board) the number of possible "messages" is infinite, and even against the grinding forces of chaos, incredibly complex structures become possible.

One can see how expanding the grammar by a factor of 2 (C,G,A and T), and giving them an infinite board, complete with loads of free energy to battle entropy can, instead of remaining a meaningless mush, create increasingly complex structures: evolution.

Everything in the universe is an uphill struggle against entropy. This suggests to me that two people playing go are, in essence pushing a giant boulder uphill with nothing but their minds. Explains to me why it's so much work sometimes!

Projects

I'm currently working on writing a game-gatherer that will allow you to download all your go games off the KGS server. I'm writing it in wxPython, so it 'should' end up being cross platform. That's kind of on the sidelines for now as I'm doing consulting work for gollyGee software http://www.gollygee.com.