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Hactar go is not available in Google Play for time being. Again, it is unclear if it will come back.

I am considering moving Hactar Go permanently somewhere else. One option would be Aptoide (https://en.aptoide.com/). If you have experiences on it, please let me know!

Why this?

Google has decided that I must verify my identity for merchant account. But at the same time they have taken care that I cannot do it. And there is no way to fix it (according to Google).

So Google instructs me that I should create new google account, then create google play account etc. Quite bit of work, but ok, I did try it.

Unfortunately google blocked the new google account after creation, citing policy of not allowing multiple accounts!

Quite a catch-22 (perhaps Google-22?), all by Google!

Update 2026-04-07

Google is progressing slowly, there are quite many steps where google takes their time to require appeal or verify something etc.

Attempt to publish in Aptoide did hit an unexpected problem: They do not recognize me as a valid application owner for Hactar go. So one more appeal in process. This is not very good start to publishing in Aptoide…

After playing over 1000 games in cgos server, Hactar-7-197-p is now first among recently playing engines. Version has two improvements over previous version.

Network is now somewhat better. Training has gone thru 197-181=16 generation, and this made visible improvement.

However, biggest change is thinking in opponents time (“pondering”, thus -p). It helps as it gives more network evaluations. Big impact is also when  normal search starts, pondering has created  small tree to start with.
This small tree helps as GPU is providing number of parallel evaluations to build MC tree, and getting sensible place for these evaluations  is possible as soon as there is small tree.

Testing smaller GPU

Most recent version Hactar-7-209a-p is using P4000 GPU instead of 1080ti; thus it is running with only half of the GPU power!

Still, it looks like Hactar-7-209a-p is almost as good as Hactar-7-197-p. This goes back to reducing latency of tree walk, NN evaluation, tree update cycle. Thus even if there is only half of the network evaluations, evaluations are a lot more relevant.

At some point I will make this improved engine to play using 1080ti. It will interesting to see its wining-%…