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Software and Hardware Reviews

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Titlesort icon Review Date Body
Go Professional III ~ Oxford Softworks: review 2000-06

The programme is very easy to use, with an intuitive interface. Twelve large buttons at the top, information down the left, and the board taking up most of the rest of the screen. It does all you would expect: saving games, loading complete and partly complete games, stepping backwards and forwards through saved games. You can add comments to the games but there is no facility to record alternative sequences.

...
Go Professional: review 1996-10

To run Go Professional, you will need a PC running Windows 95, with a CDrom drive and a graphics card that supports a 256-colour mode (or better).

Go Professional is a Go-playing program. It is the commercial version of Mick Reiss's "Go4++" program, which did very well in the FOST World Computer Go Championship last September. It took second place, having lost only the eventual winner, HandTalk.

To run Go Professional,...
Go++: Review 2003-09

Review by Nick Wedd, from British Go Journal 132 (Autumn 2003)

Previous we have carried reviews of Go Professional, Go Professional II, and Go Professional III. These programs used the Go-playing engine written by Dr. Michael (Mick) Reiss, which competed in international Computer Go tournaments under the name Go4++. Dr. Reiss was...
GoGap: review 1997-07
GoGap is Windows software for playing through professional games, and counting how good you are at predicting the next move. It is published by Boyixun in Beijing. The review copy was the "Fujisawa Hideyuki" special.

Installation was very easy. However when I tried to run it on two PCs running Windows NT, it did not load, but produced ten "ding" sounds. Presumably this is an error message, stating that it does not like NT, or high-...
GoGoD (Games of Go on Disk) 2004-06

BGJ 135 Summer 2004

Reviewer: Andrew Morris

In the old days mighty tomes would arrive on a reviewer’s desk with a ‘thwump’. GoGoD, a massive database of over thirty thousand professional games, plus additional material and go utility programs, comes on one CD. It registers scarcely a clatter.

GoGoD, which is the result of T Mark Hall and John Fairbairn’s teamwork, is more than just a collection of game...
GoGoD: Re-Reviewed by Francis Roads 2011-07

GoGoD was previously reviewed in BGJ 135, Autumn 2004

Regular tournament attendees will be familiar with the sight of T Mark Hall sitting in a corner with his laptop, demonstrating and hoping to sell GoGoD (Games of Go on Disc). Many's the time I've walked past. "I've got a couple of shelves of Go books, half of them unread", I would think, "I've no need of that stuff." I was wrong.

If you...
Goliath 3.5 and Tsume Go Goliath 1997-01

Goliath version 3.5

Goliath is a Go-playing program, written by Mark Boon. He wrote a version for the Atari many years ago, which won computer Go tournaments in 1989, 1990, and 1991. However version 3.5 runs on the Macintosh and on Windows 95 and NT. (A version for Windows 3.1 may be available: customers should enquire about this with the supplier, address below.) The Windows versions require a 486...
Gotools 1.3 for PC by Thomas Wolf: review 1996-03
Nick Wedd passed this program on to me for review since he had been involved too much in its production to be able to give an unbiased assessment.

The central tool of this program is a life and death problem solver, which is capable of getting the right answer to problems considerably more difficult than any other program I know of. It uses this capacity in several ways:

You feed in a problem and it solves it for you. Before...
HandTalk version 94.01: review 1994-05

HandTalk is written by Professor Chen Zhixing, of Zhongshau University, Guangzhou, China.

First impressions are disappointing: it is a Dos program, and offers a minimum of facilities. You can choose among three board sizes, set the handicap, choose whether to play Black or White, and assign it a playing strength from 1 to 7. You can also set up positions, and save and re-load games. When playing, you can take back moves. But...
HandTalk version 96.09 1997-01

The advertisement says that the program has a 4 kyu diploma from Japan, this seems optimistic, the first game I played against it I gave it 9 stones and won by 241 (But I am a mean handicap player, I can normally give a real 4 kyu about 100 komi in a 9 stone game). However Handtalk is the first computer program I have seen trying a genuine premeditated swindle, and for much of the time it feels like playing someone who knows what is going...