Which of the following questions or experiences are yours when trying to use the AI to learn from your go game mistakes?
- I don't understand why the AI says my move is bad. Too bad I can't ask the AI why.
- Do I need to pay for the AI or is the free version "good enough"?
- I see a move that looks good other than the ones the AI says are good and bad. How can I ask the AI how good this other move is?
- The AI is showing a sequence that no mere mortal could possibly understand. Of what use is that?
- What are all those different colors and numbers the AI is showing. Yellow? Green? Red? Blue?
- Now I see why the AI move is much better than mine. How can save this result as a pop quiz question?
- ok I believe the AI move is better than mine but I don't understand why. What should I do?
- Which AI should I use? OGS? AI sensei? z baduk?
I would like to address all of these questions in this blog series.
I find the AI Sensei website free version quite valuable for improving my go game.
My environment is the OGS (online go server) platform, chrome web browser, and a Microsoft Windows enabled laptop, but I will write generally enough so that if your environment is, for example, KGS, safari browser, and an Apple IOS enabled laptop, the information I present should still be useful with minimum adjustment.
For this first installment, I'll walk you through the basics of getting AI advice about an online game I played.
If you haven't done so yet, create yourself an account on the AI Sensei website https://ai-sensei.com/news . I use the free version and don't spend any money.
Upload the SGF of your go game into AI sensei. If your browser is chrome, and your go game was played on OGS, here is how to do the upload. Bring up the game on OGS in a browser tab. Click once in the browser address bar, which highlights the URL, and copy the URL with CTRL-C. Then, on your logged-in AI sensei browser tab, choose "add game(+)" and then use CTRL-V to paste your game URL into the "paste game link" field. Here is a video of me loading a go game from OGS into AI sensei.
The video shows a game that I already uploaded into AI sensei, so if you just uploaded one, you may have to click an additional "upload" button in AI sensei to complete the uploading process.
I will now show how to find your game errors, and get information about what you should have played instead. Please refer to the following screenshot:
If this is the first game you have loaded into AI sensei, you should set your student level. I am a 3k played on ogs right now (ask me next week and I will be 1k or 5k depending on how well I play!) so for me, setting the student level to 6d seems useful. If you set the student level to too weak a value, then AI sensei will not show you some errors you'd really like to see, but if you set the student level to too strong a value, AI Sensei will show you errors that are really too subtle for your level of play. The student level setting appears in the lower right of the photo.
After loading the game into AI sensei, click the red "next error" button shown in the upper right of the screenshot. I clicked the button a few times to bring the game to a particular error shown in the screenshot that I would like to discuss here.
I was white and I approached the upper left corner in a typical way with the C14 move. Black attached to the stone with D14, and I made a typical hane at d13. Note that this move is shown in red because the AI says this move is an error. Also note the blue circle at k13. This indicates that the AI says that instead of the upper left hane, I should have extended at k13.
This brings us to a general piece of advice I have for using the AI to learn from. The advice is:
Make up reasons that the AI move is better than yours!
In this example, the reasons I make up for why the AI move is better than mine are these: My upper center J13 group and my upper right P17 group are not that strong yet, and if they were strong, I could use them to attack black's upper N18 group. By extending to K13, I strengthen both of the upper white groups because the two cutting black stones at M13 are being weakened.
That's it for today (Mar 8, 2025, a blustery day here in Amherst MA). I look forward to sharing more soon.