Go!

[Aenivae_Ikeda]

Anyone familiar with the game Go? It's a board game that developed out of connect 5 in India, and then Chess, and Chinese Checkers, and all those other games developed out of it.

 

There's some pretty interesting things surrounding it, I thought you guys might find it interesting.

 

The number of possible games on a Go board exceeds the estimated number of neutrons in the known universe. So, it's speculated that no two Go games have ever been identical.

 

Also, interesting psychology note. There's a ranking system in the game that starts with what is called Kyu, and then goes to what is called Dan(Dawn). It starts with 30Kyu being the lowest, then goes down to 1Kyu, and then starts from 1Dan up to 8Dan. Interesting thing here is that between 30 and 17Kyu you only use the language portions of your brain to understand the board, and after that you switch to primarilly using the spacial centers of your brain until a certain area of rank where you combine both areas. So it's remarked that Go, eventually, will cause you to use the entirety of your brain to think out situations on the board.

 

Anyone who has seen the movie Pi/3.14 or A Beautiful Mind has seen Go before. There's a good quote about Go in Pi that says something to the effect of; The ancient Japanese considered the Go board to be the perfect model of the universe. At first glance it may seem structured and ordered, but it actually represents endless systems of chaos because of it's infinite possibility. As the board is filled those systems become less and less until numerous patterns underlying the formations of the stones and their relationship to the board, and each other, appear.

 

So yeah, just checking if anyone played or was interested in learning.

[Moribundus]

I know about Go and I don't play it, although similar game called "Jews" (I didn't invent the name) was very popular on high school.

 

We were told in AI class, that while champions of Othello (Reversi) refuse to play with a computer, because it is too good, champions of Go refuse to play with computer simply because it's too dumb

[Guest Scathane]

Interested in learning you say? You tutoring?

[Darth_Rob]

Never heard of it before. Is it a game you would purchase in a store, like a box of chess or checkers, or is it a custom game made from other game pieces?

[Aenivae_Ikeda]

You can purchase a board that usually comes with two bags of stones, but if you go to gokgs.com then you can play it online.

 

I wouldn't call it tutoring but I can teach the basic rules and the theory up to the rank I'm at. More than happy to actually.

[Mad78]

I am very curious about this game. An overview of the basic rules would be nice.

[Aenivae_Ikeda]

Basically the rules are like this.

 

Two players; Black and white, each with a bag of white or black stones. Each player places a stone each turn.

 

The game is usually played on a 19X19 square grid, with players placing stones on the intersections, not the squares. The idea is to capture territory, which you do by sealing off sections of the board with groups of stones that can't be killed. So it works in your favor to make formations of stones that don't use many stones(because each intersection counts for a point, so you don't want to fill your points.) that way you retain as much territory as possible with the least amount of stones. The intersections surrounding a stone horizontally and vertically are called it's liberties, and if the opposite player takes all of those away by placing on them then the stone with no liberties dies. This applies to groups of stones as well.

 

The rules are very simple but the actual strategic and tactical aspects of the game are widely complex and convoluted. If someone wants me to explain the rules in a game and demonstrate just how complex it can get then get a gokgs.com account and look up my account name which is Hsean, and I'll gladly do a tutorial.