pggo is a simple interface to gnugo and other programs that support the GTP protocol, the successor to the older GMP protocol. pggo can match human vs GTP, GTP vs human and GTP vs GTP, but not human vs human. It has automatic scoring at the end of the game, so may be well suited for use by utter novices to the game of go.

pggo is available for download here. The current release is 0.95 - it hasn't hit 1.0 yet because I need more feedback on installation instructions. Other than that, pggo seems reasonably featureful and quite stable. Please note that you'll probably find installation a snap if you're comfortable installing pygame apps already. The symlinks in the archive that were bufuddling windows users have been removed.

pggo is written in python with pygame (which is a 2nd generation SDL wrapper for the python very high level programming language). The program mostly needs some finishing touches, some artistic help, and at some point it'd be great to find some people who want to create standalone binaries for just about any platform so endusers don't have to install python with pygame.

pggo was written on redhat 7.2, with pygame 1.3 and python 2.1.2. It has only been tested on linux. It should run on MacOS X or Windows with a tad of work, since these platforms also have python and pygame available for them.

If you're interested in helping out by contributing code or documentation (including installation steps!) to pggo, please drop me a note. Or if you just have suggestions for how to improve pggo, or even just want to say you enjoyed the program, I'd be more than happy to get these kind of notes as well.

Here's a screenshot in jpeg and png formats. There's some artifacting in the jpeg version that's due to the conversion to jpeg - the application doesn't look strange like that - it looks more like the png version, but not everybody's browser understands png yet.

pggo also has a text mode, which may not require pygame or a threaded python interpreter (tested only on a system that had pygame and threaded python, so I may not really have eliminated the dependency).

Tentative future enhancements include a tournament mode for GTP vs GTP, a tutoring mode that automatically adjusts handicap and komi based on your win/loss ratio, a prettier board and stones, and the ability to save a game as SGF. Definite future enhancements include better installation instructions and the ability to run pggo from any directory.

back to my linux/unix go page.