A different kind of Go
Chris Garlock | Published on 2/7/2025
Goperfekt is a different kind of Go program. Very different. Play on boards with various geometries,
including rectangles, cylinders, toruses, “and other exotic forms”, all on innumerable board sizes. You can allow suicide moves -- or not -- choose between three kinds of final results and among several ways of counting the points. Goperfekt, an Esperanto term that means “perfection in go”, is the brainchild of François Lorrain, a Canadian mathematician and go player from Montréal who’s also a member of the American Go Association. “It must be said that this program has a big flaw,” Lorrain says. “On boards of about 12 points or more, when Goperfekt itself plays, it reacts sometimes terribly slowly — calculation times can be very long. Goperfekt remains basically an experimental program.”