Go Congress 2016
by Anders Kierulf
2016-08-13
I really enjoyed the Go Congress in Boston this year. Some observations:
- Next year, I will bring a 9.7" iPad. The 12.9" iPad Pro just doesn’t fit well between Go boards at the tournament, so I ended up using my iPhone to record games. Luckily, there’s an app for that.
- Brady Daniels makes a good case that you should come to the next Go Congress. And Kevin’s Go Talk about “What did you like most about the Go Congress?” clearly shows that people are a main feature, not just Go. Indeed, it was great to meet many old friends again, and meeting new ones in real life for the first time, in particular David Nolen, John Tromp, and Jonathan Hop.
- I always get a lot of valuable feedback from SmartGo Kifu and Go Books users at the Congress, mostly positive, some feature requests. Here’s a happy SmartGo user from Kyoto: Go instructor Yasuko Imamura.
- There were several interesting talks about AlphaGo (watch the Opening Keynote and AlphaGo Insider). It’s clear that AlphaGo is adding to and not taking away from Go. I’m really looking forward to the commented AlphaGo games the DeepMind team teased several times.
- I just realized that I never made it to the vendor area in the basement. Future Congress organizers: please put the vendors where everybody sees them.
- The 13x13 tournament is usually a fun warm-up for the main tournament, hope it will be back next year.
Looking forward to San Diego in 2017! See you all there.