Alejo's Tenuki

Here you have a review on the final release of Universal 3D Chess:

Currently you can only watch it through youtube or download this version with a 1036x676 resolution HERE (encoded with Xvid).

The final public realease is already available at the project's homepage: VoilaMonsieur

Last Sunday was held the final game to decide who would go to the World Mind Sports Games representing the USA in Beijing in October. The game confronted Joey Hung 8d vs Jie Li 9d and it was very interesting and very didactic as a sample of how to count ko threats and how to handle them.

But what strikes me the most was a sequence I found during the game and I'm still thinking it's worth trying. I was said during the game that my move wasn't good, but without explanation.

As you can see on the next image, there is a big fight going on the upper right corner of the board where there are several white and black groups involved and winning this fight would almost decide the result of the game.

Now that you've seen the board I'll tell you that the original sequence ends up with a huge ko for live or death. You can see the whole game on one board and my variation on another one.

When I saw that there some beta testers needed to work in the project I signed up immediatelly as I wanted to get involved in the project. The fact is that I can't tell you much about the program but I'd like to show you this image I got on my laptop with some boards opened, different zooming on each board, with the 3D ultra-high-details enabled, so that you make yourself an idea of how it looks like

The image is made on a 1440x900 resolution (but compressed with JPG, in order to save space). You should take into account that this image does not represent the actual quality of the final product.

If you want to see more images and know more about this program go here: U3DChess at GoDiscussions.com

This week I got into a new job where everything I knew is futile and the daily routine is based on pouring information into my brain from 8:00 to 18:00 (with a lunch break). Unfortunatelly, in order to understand the slightest amount of this knowledge, my brain needs to process it at a lower pace at home during the following hours.

The result is that my free time is reduced to it's smallest representation and I'm too tired to place stones in a goban in any sort of logical order. Just to give you a quick sample, I haven't checked my computer in 3 days, something which I used to do at least twice a day, and I didin't go to the usual weekly club meeting. So, in the end, the spare time for Go has been reduced to weekends where I have to combine it with my girlfriend... so I guess I won't be playing as much Go or reviewing software on the forecoming months as I had been doing lately.

A couple things more before finishing the post:

-The pro games database has been deleted from the databases' site in order to avoid some copyright conflicts. It seems that there are different points of view in this field, so if I don't want to get into trouble with anyone, deleting it seems the most reasonable behaviour.

-I've added the possibility to announce yourself on this site, you'll see the link at the upper left.

-The videoreviews of MoyoGoStudio and Stonebase are partially done, but as they require quite a lot of dedication to finish them in order to get a decent result, and some video post-processing, so these two projects will be delayed until said otherwise.

Yesterday I was reading the usual feeds on my google reader till I realised that there were only 5 major writers... out of a total list over 30 sources. Then, I decided to take a look at the Go Blogs list on Sensei's Library, just to realise that the Active/Inactive list of bloggers was quite outdated.

The result: (in pink the new inactive ones)

All in all, 15 blogs had to be removed from the Active Blogs list due to the lack of activity during the last 6 months or the impossibility to reach their addresses. Some of them already announced their desire to stop blogging, but others were just left to their own luck by their owners.

Even there is still a nice list of active blogs, if you check your feeds reader, you'll realise that there are only a few of them which are regularly posting on their blogs. In fact, most of the feeds you received last month came from only 5 authors. Now I hope you get what I mean by Go Blogs Crisis.