Playing in a 2023-round Go tournament
not April Fools'
Short updates:
We’re planning on going to Japan in June. More to come on this trip in this space, I’m sure. Sadly, I’m probably missing Natalia Lafourcade at Chicago Theater (6/14 & 15).
Speaking of visiting Japan, the Italian musician
has been writing some great posts on eating in Japan (part 1 on sushi and part 2 mostly on noodles, so far).I thought I might write about eating at Obélix or Brasero, but I don’t think these will be full posts. They were both excellent, especially Brasero, which is a South American restaurant with a heavy dose of Brazilian, which is uncommon in Chicago.
I’ll write about an internet activity that I’ve been doing for the past 2 years, and could conceivably continue to do for the rest of my life.
What is Go?
I need to start by talking a bit about the game of Go and my history with it. Let’s grab the first paragraph of Wikipedia:
Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to fence off more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day. A 2016 survey by the International Go Federation's 75 member nations found that there are over 46 million people worldwide who know how to play Go, and over 20 million current players, the majority of whom live in East Asia.
Great. In terms of game play, all you probably need to know to understand the story below is that Go involves 2 players taking turns, trying to outsmart the other, kind of like chess. And here’s a visual from the Wikipedia page.
Go is a reasonably popular game in Japan1—though it’s often seen as a game for old men—and I knew about the game when I was growing up there. But I don’t think I played a single game until my mid-20s when I was in Berkeley.
What inspired me to start was a conversation with my grad school friends about game AI. We all knew that computers have been stronger than humans at chess for some time, and some of us knew that computers weren’t even close to beating the strongest humans at Go2. I got curious about why this was the case.
I found a website where I could play against a computer program, weak even by the standards at that time, and quickly started to beat it most of the time. I needed to find better opponents, so I found a place to play against other people online. Then, a couple months into playing online only, a friend—who was not part of that game AI conversation—asked me if I wanted to go to the UC Berkeley’s campus Go club, so I went.
You may or may not be surprised to learn that this game has been a major source of adult friendships for me. I’ve made friends at Go clubs in Madison, western Massachusetts, and Evanston. And at various local tournaments and at the annual US Go Congress—the last Congress I attended was near Cleveland in 2023.
When I saw the advice that lonely men should seek fellowship before friendship, I immediately had an example of how that worked.
If you’re in even a medium-sized city in the US, there’s almost certainly someone playing regularly in your vicinity. The Baduk Club3 website can help you find clubs and players.
Beginnings
One of the more popular servers to play Go online, especially among English speakers, is the earnestly-named Online-Go Server (OGS). A big feature of this server is that you can play “correspondence” games, which can go on for many days. A common time setting is to get a day added to your clock when you make a move, so if you want, you could have dozens of games going at the same time, leisurely making a move on each game every day.
It’s a very different challenge compared to the fast-paced games that are the norm elsewhere. You get to use the online board to try out different sequences of moves and analyze the future states of the game, instead of trying to do that all in your head.
Just before the start of 2023, I was invited to join a correspondence tournament on OGS, called 2023 Rounds Survival. They were clearly sending these invitations en masse, and 2575 players joined this tournament.
“2023 Rounds Survival” is a strange but perfectly descriptive name that I did not fully appreciate when I accepted the invitation. As the name suggests, there are 2023 rounds of play. This is an insane number. I would guess that 99% of tournaments end in less than 20 rounds. This tournament is 100 times longer than that.4
Given the premise of trying to play such a large number of rounds, there are some unusual rules for this tournament. OGS allows users to be in “vacation mode”, which lets them pause their games for days. For players in this tournament, vacation mode is highly discouraged. If you use it for more than 5 days during a game, you can get disqualified from the tournament.
Similarly, if your game clock runs out of time, you not only lose that game but are disqualified from the tournament.
How it’s Go-ing
In the early rounds, LOTS of players got disqualified for losing on time. Or they realized what this tournament represented—fearless exploration of the unknown, of course—and quit the tournament.
After a year, we were in round 30, and there were only 115 players left from that initial 2575.
Now, let’s extrapolate that 30 rounds/year pace. If that stayed constant, we would finish the tournament after 67 years. That would be year 2090. I am pretty pessimistic about my chances of being alive at that point.
Thankfully, as the tournament progressed, we’ve filtered ourselves down to an elite corps of diligent non-vacationing players, and the rounds have gotten faster. We got through 40 rounds last year.
If we keep that pace from here on out, we’ll finish in 2073. I think I have a chance.
You do wonder, though. Will OGS still be maintained in 2073? Will the tournament keep working without crashing somehow? How many of the current 45 remaining players, even if they’re still alive, will get disqualified from the tournament? Quit OGS? Quit Go?
One twist here is that the creator of the tournament has been disqualified already, and doesn’t seem to be actively involved anymore. Once set in motion by their intentional acts of setting up the tournament and inviting a huge number of people, the tournament is running on its own5 through OGS’s code.
Live-testing OGS’s code
And speaking of code, the code that runs OGS clearly wasn’t designed for a tournament with 2575 players that runs for 2023 rounds, and we’ve found bugs and other problems during this tournament. (I think this section is hilarious, but it gets into the nitty gritty of running a tournament. So feel free to skip to the music section.)
One bug involves byes. When there’s an odd number of players, there’s a player who isn’t paired with anyone else. Most tournaments try to make the competition to get 1st place fair and competitive, so you would give the bye to one of the people near the bottom of the standings, and assign a win to them for that round. In this tournament, the top player in the standing would often receive the bye—so they would keep running away with their lead.6
There was a mundane web development issue: On the tournament page, there’s a section with links to all the rounds so far. The links used to be arranged in one row, so as we went into 50+ rounds, you had to start scrolling left and right to find the round you wanted to look at. One of the players requested for multiple rows in this display, so that we can see all the rounds on the screen at once. And the OGS developers—it’s an open source project—were nice enough to implement it quickly.
I’m trying to imagine what the display will look like when there are 2023 rounds.
Finally, a series of apparent bugs involved some of my own games. Most pairing methods try to pair you with someone you haven’t played before, so you wouldn’t have many repeat matchups. We quickly realized that, since there were many more rounds than players in this tournament, we would start getting only repeat matchups at some point.
What appeared to happen was that the player in 2nd place could not play anyone new after round 74. So in round 75, the top 2 players in the standings played against each other, which makes perfect sense. In round 76, player #1 got a bye7, and player #2 played against player #3 (me). So far, so good.
In round 77, we all assumed that player #2 would play player #4 or someone around there in the standings. Nope. They got paired with me again. My guess is that the pairing algorithm only cares about the true-or-false question “have you played against this person?”, and doesn’t consider how many times the matchup happened.
Whatever the cause of this behavior, I’ve played player #2 in 5 of the past 6 rounds. I’ve never played the same person this many times in a single tournament before, and I expect the number to go very high.
What I’m listening to now
This might be my favorite album since Jardin by MUNYA, which I discovered in early 2024. So this is at the album-of-the-year level of enjoyment for me. Flora Hibberd is London-born and Paris-based, so she’s a English/French bilingual, like MUNYA, but there’s no French in this album.
I love the starting lyrics to the album.
There you go again, attaching meaning
Thumbing the archives of this feeling
There’s been choices made with these words, and they set up some of the recurring themes in the album: sending and receiving messages (especially through radio), and memory.8
Along with that opening track, “Code” is probably the other candidate for best song on the album. The angular melodies on these remind me of Aldous Harding.
Surprisingly given Hibberd’s background, this album was recorded in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. The arrangement and production are excellent. Some things I love: the rocking outro for “Every Incident Has Left Its Mark”, the country rock steel guitar in “Canopy”, the exuberance of “Lucky You”.
Among traditional games, shogi is more popular. This is Japanese chess, and it branched out from the same ancient origin as Western chess. One big difference from chess is that, in shogi, after you capture your opponent’s piece, one of your legal moves is to place that piece back on the board as one of your pieces. Chess players may recognize this as equivalent to the crazyhouse variant.
AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol in 2016 was a high-profile achievement for deep learning.
Baduk is the Korean name for the same game. Go, or igo, is the Japanese name, and weiqi is the Chinese name. Go is the standard term in English because Westerners learned about the game from Japanese people in the 19th century.
Thankfully, the board size used for this tournament is 9x9, which is the smallest standard size. 19x19 is considered the full-size board, and 19x19 games usually involve ~200 moves, compared to ~50 moves for 9x9 games.
This isn’t strictly true. The code doesn’t automatically disqualify players for using vacation mode. Participants are reporting them to OGS’s moderators.
This one actually seems like a bug regardless of how many players or rounds there are in a tournament.
which is weird, as I pointed out above, but we’d accepted this peculiarity at this point.
You may know by now that I’m not a big lyrics person, but my other favorite opening lyrics of an album are from Titanic Rising by Weyes Blood.
If I could go back to a time before now
Before I ever fell down
Go back to a time when I was just a girl
When I had the whole world
Gently wrapped around me
So much time, and we went through one if-clause.