Juergonaut

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Juergonaut is the online alias of me, an Austrian Go player called Jürgen Suntinger living in Vienna, studying physics at the technical university. I use this alias on every online game server and forum where I register. Originally the name is derived from the Greek mythology's Argonauts and looking at it afterwards the central syllable is well suited :-).

I was born on the 13th of December 1986 and started to play when I turned 18 in December 2004. Currently I am a rising Sandan. You can look up my real live tournament results on my [ext] EGD Player-Card.

First Contact With the Game of Go

I was a disciple of a technical highschool specialised in informatics and organisations at the end of the year 2004. At that time I was a fan of chess with a national Elo Rating of about 1700 and so it was just natural to try to develop a strong chess program. After some stupid attempts I finally finished the first version of a chess engine called Rolando which was the first one to beat its composer and other equally ranked players several times in a row at tournament settings.

At this time I was reading a lot of forums and news letters about computer chess and one evening I saw the heading of a thread called something like "Even a moron can write a chess program ...". In this post someone mentioned that in Go the best programs don't have any chance even against weak amateur players. I just could not believe that this was possible and simply thought, that no one really tried to seriously develop a Go program.

Just after I learned the basic rules and played some silly games on IGS, I hastened to build up some spaghetti code which finally was capable to play some (for me as a beginner that time) reasonable looking moves. However, its groups became clumsy very early and finally died because it didn't know anything about life and death. The engine consisted of a whole board evaluation function which just estimated weather a point is black's or white's territory according to the number of stones around. With this silly evaluation function the engine finished a 3 ply Alpha-Beta brute force search within reasonable time on a 9x9 board. This way I got a first feeling for the reason, why all the programs were still so weak. So to write a better go engine I first had to get a better understanding of this very beautiful game.

One week afterwards I was very positively surprised when I saw a school friend of mine reading an old introduction book about the basics of the game of Go after which we instantly played a lot of games together not knowing anything about strategy or tactics. It was very amusing that time because I felt like my understanding doubled with every single game.

Currently Studying in Depth

Gengen Gokyo

I once showed a printed and bound version from tasuki's [ext] tsumego collection to Kobayashi Chizu sensei. She just asked me where the solutions can be looked up. A little bit puzzled I replied that I though it would be better not to have the solutions ready instantly, but she just argued that studying the Gengen Gokyo is much more about feeling than thinking. Since I know from university, that the best way for me to learn something is to simply write it down, I began to start a very big projekt: Writing my own version of Gengen Gokyo including the solutions with ballpen and paper!

Practical Life and Death Problems

The Hankuk Kiwon has published a great series of 23 books covering every aspect of the game of Go. The 8th and 9th volume cover a lot of Life and Death problems resulting from standard corner and side invasion patterns which are very essential to study.

Go Seigen's Game Collection

Since he is said to be one of the strongest go players of all time, I thought it should be very interesting and helpful to study all of his games. Therefore I ordered a chinese game collection containing most of Go Seigens's recorded games printed in 8 volumes each covering at least 100 games. I feel very comfortable with the design, the diagrams and the manufacturing in general. The pictures of Go Seigen at the beginning of each volume are also very nice to look at.

http://members.chello.at/suntisheaven/goseigencollection.jpg

KGS Avatar Collection

Actually I wanted to change my KGS Avatar at least once every month, but time flies so fast ... .

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This is a copy of the living page "Juergonaut" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2009 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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