Soksoo is a program that reads games of go in sgf format, and creates a sort of joseki/trick move database viewable with an an sgf browser. It is intended for use with amateur games, as they are readily available, and contain the sort of mistakes amateurs need to learn from.

Average rank, minimum rank, maximum rank and raw count of the players playing a move are given at each node in the resulting sgf file, which can be viewed as a sort of amateur joseki dictionary. This enables one to find a relatively strong refutation to a nonjoseki (soksoo in Korean, shingata in Japanese - anyone know the Chinese?) move.

To build the real thing, you have to get the games from KGS, and last I heard, you had to ask around to get them. However, I've saved you the trouble by including a copy of soksoo.sgf from a big run ("make huge") in the distribution. You can still do "make tiny", but you can't do "make small", "make medium", "make large" or "make huge" out of the box.

Soksoo rhymes with the Japanese "Moku". The name was kindly suggested by sbchoi of KGS.

Soksoo makes pretty heavy demands on an sgf editor. As of 2016-01-02, gGo 1.0 appears to work best.

• gGo
  • It doesn't appear to work with gGo 0.4.1. gGo gives an error while reading the file.
  • It does appear to work pretty well with gGo 1.0
• glGo
  • This doesn't appear to even run on a modern Linux system. It was a pretty cool idea though.
  • No idea if it works on Windows or macOS.
• cgoban
  • cgoban 1.x brings the file up, but it's hard to navigate.
  • cgoban 2.5.4 brings the file up, but it's hard to navigate.
  • cgoban 3.5.20 did not appear to read the file.
• qgo 2.0~git-20131123-1build1 does not appear to work anymore - at least, I didn't see a way of navigating the large tree.
• RubyGo 12.3 gives an error on Ruby 1.9.3, without even trying Soksoo - see below. I looked for the author's e-mail address, but apparently he no longer makes it available. The doc says RubyGo has trouble with Kogo's Joseki dictionary, so perhaps it would have problems with Soksoo too.
  $ rubygo
  /home/dstromberg/RubyGo/RubyGo/lib/go.rb:104: invalid multibyte char (US-ASCII)
  /home/dstromberg/RubyGo/RubyGo/lib/go.rb:104: syntax error, unexpected tIDENTIFIER, expecting ')'
  ...adiobutton','label'=> 'Français','variable'=>$language,'valu...
  ... ^
  /home/dstromberg/RubyGo/RubyGo/lib/go.rb:104: syntax error, unexpected tIDENTIFIER, expecting $end
  ...,'label'=> 'Français','variable'=>$language,'value'=>'fr','c...
  ... ^
• ManyFaces reportedly just gives an error when reading the file.
• Goban reportedly works, though my use of AB instead of B may be muddling things for the variation selector a bit.
• Sabaki 0.35.0 seemed to pause a while, before eventually giving a black window.
• I'm interested in hearing about which other SGF editors it does/doesn't work with.

The code is GPL licensed. The doc it generates is FDL licensed.

Download here.

BUGS

1. Stones that are captured, are not removed from the board in this release
2. Corners are examined in isolation. You have no information about ladders and other ways other corners impact the corner under study and vice versa. I'm sure soksoo will be heavily criticized for this, but I still find it useful. If you do too then great; if not, that's fine too.
3. Variations probably should be sorted by average strength, or perhaps max strength. Unfortunately, ISTR hearing that some SGF editors display variations in the opposite order of others.