I am a Hikaru no go boom child XD

Family traditions, My grandfather played Go, my father, my brother, and now my niece and nephew.

When I was a student, Deep Blue beating Kasparov was old news, but AI was still a long way from even shodan level. That fact came up in my A-Level Computing course and I learnt the rules. Once I got to uni, other people on my CompSci course also knew the basics so I got to play some games.

AlphaGo was obviously very interesting for me, so I watched a lot the of games and commentary as well as playing a bit online for the first time. I’ve picked up the game again lately, hopefully for good this time!

A friend from Korea taught me. In retrospect, they were kinda weak, but that worked out okay because I actually stood a chance without a crazy handicap. Didn’t really get too much into the game then, but somehow I eventually heard about CGS going live, so I gave it another try. The environment that day was really fun: thousands of players from around the world all hopping online at the same time, the chat room scrolling like mad, lots of new players to match with on all board sizes, the server crashing under the load. Good times.