A Half-Point Victory: Analyzing the Iconic Go Match from Hikaru no Go
Exploring the Dramatic Game Between Sai and Toya Meijin Through AI-Powered Analysis
Hikaru no Go holds nostalgic value for many of my peers, and I’ve often seen posts on some game or animate forums where people mention that their introduction to Go came from this series.
One of the most iconic matches in the series is from Episodes 55 and 56, where Sai (playing white) faces off against Toya Meijin (playing black). This match marks the climax of the entire series, with two Go masters battling it out, ending in a half-point difference.
To this day, I still can’t fully grasp the intricacies of that game. I can only rely on the background music to figure out who won or lost. 😂
That made me think of my strongest AI friend: ChatGPT. I used GPT-4 to analyze the match, and it turned out to be quite interesting. Since GPT-4 can recognize images, I uploaded the game board. Based on the analysis, the result was the same as in the anime: white wins by half a point. Unfortunately, I can’t share a link directly since I uploaded an image, but here’s a screenshot of the result.
With GPT-4o (a non-image-recognizing version), I had to manually recreate the game for analysis. Interestingly, the logic and reasoning felt a bit off, and it concluded with white winning by a whopping 18.5 points: Link to the result.
I posed the same question to Google Gemini, but it only told me, “Go scoring is a task that requires patience and attention to detail. A deeper understanding of Go rules and scoring methods will help you analyze games more accurately.” It felt like a lazy answer that kept going in circles. 😂
Link to Gemini result.
When I asked Claude the same question, it took multiple attempts before it finally gave me the correct answer: white wins by half a point. The first two tries said black won by half a point. Unfortunately, Claude doesn’t provide shareable links, so I’ve attached a screenshot.
In the image, it said:
Let’s analyze this Go game:
Territory Calculation:
- White stones: approximately 82 points
- Black stones: approximately 87 points
Komi Rules:
- You mentioned that black has to give 5.5 points as komi.
Result Calculation:
- Black’s actual score = 87–5.5 = 81.5 points
- White’s score = 82 points
Outcome:
- White 82 points > Black 81.5 points
Thus, with black giving 5.5 points of komi, white wins by a narrow margin of 0.5 points.
So for the Claude, it tries 3 times to get correct answer.
As for Perplexity, I tried using the math mode for analysis. Since its CoT (Chain of Thought) feature doesn’t support Chinese, I tried using English on my second attempt. Unfortunately, the calculations were way off, with wildly different results:
Link to Perplexity result.
