Building a 24/7 Go Bot with KataGo on KGS
I wanted a Go bot that plays games on KGS while I sleep. Not to grief anyone — just to have a persistent presence on the server, accumulate games, and watch a machine play the oldest board game in the world against real humans, all day, every day.
The result: a Python wrapper around KataGo and kgsGtp.jar, running on a $5/month Lightsail instance, playing Chinese rules on 19x19, saving every game as an SGF file, and reporting stats back to me. Here’s how it works.