GNU Go is a free program that plays the game of Go. GNU Go has played thousands of games on the NNGS Go server. GNU Go is now also playing regularly on the Legend Go Server in Taiwan, on the WING server in Japan, and many volunteers run GNU Go clients on KGS. GNU Go has established itself as the leading non-commercial go program in the recent tournaments that it has taken part in.

GNU Go 3.6

GNU Go 3.6, released November 17, 2004, is the latest stable version. It is portable and known to work well on GNU/Linux, Windows and Mac OS/X systems. You can download it here. Please read this important note describing potential problems that can arise with clients because GNU Go 3.6 is the first version that can resign games.

How strong is GNU Go?

This is a tough question. Against humans, its results vary a lot depending on how well the human knows its weaknesses, and on other factors (time settings, hardware, etc.), but most robots running GNU Go on one of the go servers achieve a rank of 8k-9k. Compared to other go programs, it may be 1-2 stones weaker than the top commercial go programs.

What you can find on these web pages

On the development page, you can find the latest development versions, and other information about GNU Go's development. The page on current patches might only be of interest to you once you are a GNU Go developer. The documentation is the complete texinfo documentation of the forthcoming GNU Go 3.6 converted to html.

The free go software directory tries to list all free software related to the game of go. The link collection directs you to pages related to computer go and GNU Go in particular that we have found useful.

Send inquiries and bug reports to gnugo@gnu.org.