- About 

GoTools started around 1985 as a project of Volker Wehner and Thomas Wolf to write a full game playing program. What survived after 2 years was the development of a program for solving life and death problems continued by T Wolf. Over the years a number of features had been added, for example the ability to generate new problems, like the problem in the lower left corner of the page.

A free resource resulting from this activity is a 40,000 problem collection for research either in computer learning methods or computer go.

A comfortable and rich environment to set diagrams in Latex had been provided by Volker Liebscher. This has been used for publications and books.

Since January 1st, 2000 there is an interactive tsume go solving Java Applet in different languages online. Thanks to Jean-Pierre Vesinet a graphical interface had been added. A later extension allows to play any ladder problems.

A program to check given life and death problems and their solutions thoroughly has been used together with Sylvie Shen to analyse a Korean 500 problem collection

An improvement of the program GoTools but also a study in its own right is a large database of monolithic eyes that was programmed in collaboration with Matthew Pratola.

A seedlings research grant from DARPA in 2008 provided the funding for a study of a new concept: the static evaluations of Go positions through the formulation and solution of dynamical systems lead to two papers.

In collaboration with Yutae Seo visiting Brock University for 5 months Sep 2010 - Feb 2011 two book manuscripts with collections of life and death problems have been completed.

Together with Viktor Stremler an online game for guessing moves in professional games has been added.

Work performed in 2012 and the beginning of 2013 shifted towards mathematical topics in Go: the analysis of semeai with approach moves and the mathematics of seki with related publications .