Go

[Dennis_Mahon]

I hope this is the right forum to post this question:

Is anyone here familiar with the Japanese strategy game of Go ? How does it compare to "Western" games like chess?

[riku]

I know the game, and play it very, very poorly. Compared western chess, it at least has lesser rules, which makes it much harder to control well.

When chess has goal to check-mate your opponent, in go you try to gain and hold more area of gameboard than your opponent. There is only one kind of pieces for each player; so called stones that are placed by turns to crosses on board. Opponent's stones - and area s/he has claimed - can be captured by taking away the possibility to put more stones to line with ones before. Game ends when either one doesn't want to put more stones on board (seeing that it wouldn't change the situation anywhere).

By handicap system, players of go can have very different level and still the game stays interesting and challenging for both player.

I'm not quite sure, but got this feeling that go is originally chinese game, holding name like 'Wei - Qi' or something. I can be wrong in this.

With respect,
Riku Ylönen

[De_Franza]

What he said.
There's a great computer version with a detailed help feature called "Igowin" for windows. you can find it here http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html
and it's free. if you like it, there's a pay version that's better. After playing the little free version for a few months, I've improved a bit, so the practice helps, and it's easier than cleaning up all those little stones.

[Dennis_Mahon]

Thanks for the help guys.

[Douglas]

I had a computer program for go-moku which is very simple version of go: five in a row. I had it installed at work, and a co-worker aske dme what I was playing, and I answered "go". So he went! :rolleyes:

[Poke]

Fantastic online Go community at http://kgs.kiseido.com/ (you'll have to download some software, but it's all free). Most of the players on there are amazingly good, meaning a rank beginner like me ends up staring at most games in incomprehension.

One of my friends is getting quite good and is going for his shodan ranking next year; he said you can (if you know the game well enough) tell the personality of your opponents by the moves they make. He taught some of us how to play last year; the rules are simple to learn, but boy, does that game take a long time to understand. I still don't get it yet. But it's fun.

[JujitsuFreak]

Chess is more violent and cut-throat, more my taste.

Ive never played Go but it looks highly mathematical. Chess has that too but not nearly as much, I presume. Wasnt Go in that movie by Russell Crowe where he played the role of a Nobel Prize person.... whose real name escapes me right now, point is the movie was about mathematics and Go was the common game seen being played on campus, at least I think so. It was a grid with stones of two colors... that's gotta be it.

:toast:

[Jeff Burger]

I like the game but never really took the time to get good at it.

I loved chess as a kid but seldom play now.
Changed the goal a bit. We liked to play to the last man "Annihilation Chess".

Jeff

[David Craik]

I like Go, but it is difficult for me. I have played chess since I was a child, and I think I'm a *fair* player - I know a number of openings and can control the center reasonably well - but Go seems to require a slightly different logic and way of looking at the board. Ah, perhaps with more practice.

BTW, the tutorial that comes with Igowin is quite good.

[Patrick Skerry]

I belonged to the Massachusetts Go Association in Somerville, MA. (http://skywriting.com/massgo/) for just one year. Even though it was a Go Club (like a chess club), and had over 80 members, no one ever showed up and stayed at home and played Go over the interenet.

But I did get to play Go enough to compete in one small tournament, had four games, won one. I was taught that the Japanese consider Go a martial art.

The game was invented in China and called Wei Chi; it is called Baduk in Korea; but is more commonly known by its Japanese name of Go.

GO is a board game like chess, has stalemates like chess, named certain moves like chess (ko is the name of a move in Go like en passe is the name of a move in chess) but that's where the simularities end.

Go has 80 black stones and 79 white stones (I think), the stones are placed on the lines not in the squares. Once you place a stone you cannot move it again (unless you've captured a stone in 'ko'). There is no ranking amongst the stones, such as king, queen etc. (That is found in the Japanese game of Shogi, which is much closer to chess). And Go is won by 1. outmanuevering your opponent, and 2. controlling the most area.

The game gets harder and more involved, despite the simplicity of the rules and play, the better you get at it. Championships in Japan go for three days just for a single game.

Because the stones are left where you placed them, the pattern made by the black & white stones left after a championship game are said to reflect the personality of the players and usually photographed.

The highest rank in Japan are the professional 9th dan Go players, only one American has reached this level - Michael Redmond. And he is treated like a Donn Draeger of sorts. People have dedicated their lives to the game of Go, just like in judo or chess.

I fell in love with the game, but again, very few people showed up at the Go club and I don't want to play Go on a computer. So I left the club. Probably for the best, the game is very addicting.

[David Craik]

U have trouble not because the game is hard, but because your brain has to open up to see how Go works. Right now your brain is constricted from games like Chess or living and learning in western technological society. Your eyes must open and observe more like an....animals. More peripheral vision instead of focused concentration.

The above is my opinion only.


And a pretty strong opinion too, considering you know nothing about the person to whom you are referring, and by your own admission have never even played the game. Have you ever lived in Japan? If you had you would know that in general, modern Japanese thought, procedure, and policy is possibly the most constricted, un-animalistic, and 'lockstep' of any on the planet. Even those that play Go very well. Learning is by rote, procedure is unbendable, and red tape is both mindless and mountainous. Thinking 'outside of the box' is the rare exception, not the rule.

Don't get me wrong, I love Japan, but your apparent conception that most Japanese are these free-thinking, zanshin-laden, mushin types is way off the mark. And if a society being technologically driven is somehow to blame..well, you can't get too much more technological than Japan.

I have trouble with the game quite simply because I haven't played it very much, and it requires one to look at the board and plan your strategy differently. Same as if the captain of a destroyer attempted to command an infantry regiment.

Also, your idea of chess being "restricted" compared with Go is quite wrong. Taking a game from a standard King's Gambit opening, there are 119,060,324 moves possible over the next four moves by both players. Total possible moves of the course of a chess game is 10 to the 134th power.

To put this in perspective, if you had a computer that could analyze 3,000,000 variants per second, you would receive the result after ... 10 to the 120th power years.

A full size Go board has only 361 points, and far fewer liberties than that available to place stones over the entire course of a game.

[splice]

Also, your idea of chess being "restricted" compared with Go is quite wrong. Taking a game from a standard King's Gambit opening, there are 119,060,324 moves possible over the next four moves by both players. Total possible moves of the course of a chess game is 10 to the 134th power.

To put this in perspective, if you had a computer that could analyze 3,000,000 variants per second, you would receive the result after ... 10 to the 120th power years.

A full size Go board has only 361 points, and far fewer liberties than that available to place stones over the entire course of a game.

Not to take away from your point, but I think you are wrong on this one. Pretty much everything I've seen related to computer go points to the fact that the best programs can only beat amateurs of middling strength, while chess programs can compete on par with pros. Why is that? Because go has more moves possible than go, by a large factor. A quick quote from an article I just pulled up:



From the point of view of a computer, the difference could not be more profound. Because of the tight constraints in how chess pieces can be moved, a player is faced with an average of only about 35 legal moves to consider with each turn. Computer programs like Deep Blue analyze these moves, considering the opponent's possible countermoves, and then the countermoves to the countermoves. In computer chess terminology, each move and its response is called a ply. The fastest chess programs look ahead seven or eight plies into the game.

The result is a densely proliferating tree of possibilities with the branches and twigs representing all the different ways the game could unfold. Looking ahead just seven plies (14 individual chess moves) requires examining 35 to the 14th power (more than a billion trillion) leaves representing all the various outcomes.

As the computer tries to look deeper, the number of possibilities explodes. Programmers have learned clever ways to "prune" the trees, so that all but a fraction of the paths can be discarded without plumbing them all the way to the bottom. Even so, a chess-playing computer looking ahead seven plies might consider as many as 50 or 60 billion scenarios each time its turn comes around.

As bad as that sounds, in Go the situation is drastically worse. The tree of possible moves is so broad and dense that not even the fastest computer can negotiate it. The first player can put a stone in any of 361 places; the opponent can respond by placing a stone on any of 360 places, and so on. As the game continues, there are steadily fewer possible places to play. But, on average, a player is faced with about 200 possible moves, compared with just 35 in chess.

As a computer scientist would put it, the branching factor is much higher for Go than for chess. In chess the approximate number of possible board positions after only four moves is typically 35 times 35 times 35 times 35 equals 1,500,625. For Go, the number is 200 times 200 times 200 times 200 equals 1,600,000,000 -- and far more toward the beginning of a game. Search one ply deeper and the numbers rapidly diverge: about 1.8 billion possible outcomes for chess and 64 trillion for Go.

Looking ahead 14 moves, or seven plies, in Go creates a search tree not with a mere 35 to the 14th power leaves, as for chess, but with more than 200 to the 14th power leaves. Pruning techniques cut this down to about ten thousand trillion possibilities to consider. Still, a Go computer as fast as Deep Blue (which analyzed some 200 million chess positions per second) would take a year and a half to mull over a single move.

Even worse, performing so laborious a search would give the computer no significant advantage over its human opponent. After sifting through the myriad possibilities, a chess-playing computer tries to choose the move that will leave it in the strongest position. It determines this by using fairly simple formulas called evaluation functions. Each piece can be assigned a number indicating its rank (pawns are worth 1, knights and bishops 3, rooks 5, queens 9). This figure can be multiplied by another number indicating the strength of the piece's position on the board. Other formulas quantify concepts like "king safety," or how wellprotected that piece is. These rules, called heuristics, are hardly infallible, but they give the computer a rough sense of the state of the game and a basis on which to make its decisions.

Go does not succumb to such simple analysis. There is no single piece, like a king, whose loss decides the game. Even counting the amount of territory each player has captured is not very revealing. With the placement of a single stone, a seeming underdog might surround the grand structure his opponent has been assiduously building and turn it -- jujitsu-like -- into his own. "You're stringing all these stones together, and if you don't watch out the whole collection becomes dinner for your opponent," Klinger said.


I can find other articles explaining the math more precisely (and not just using an average number of possible moves), but as far as I know, I haven't seen anyone claim the branching tree for chess is bigger than the one for go. It's just counter-intuitive, and not supported by the math.

Ah, another quick search brought this: http://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~jay/go/CS-TR-339.html#3.1 (supports the 35 average moves for chess and 200 average moves for go).

And intuitively... 361 starting possibilities for go, and what, 20 for chess? Then 360 for go, still 20 for chess (same starting position on the other side). Go goes down 1 by 1, chess will have more possibilities as the game goes on... But I doubt chess would reach a position where 200 moves are possible, and that seems to be average for go. Add to that the fact that a go game usually has more moves than chess...

Well, anyway, it always seemed pretty clear to me that go had a much bigger branching tree than chess. Do you have anything supporting the opposite?


---
Sebastien L.

[David Craik]

http://www.geocities.com/explorer127pl/szachy.html

The error is mine as I was comparing the number of single moves available in a given turn of Go to the number of possible variants (or combinations of moves) available in Chess. But the figures given in the link above for possible variants appear to be correct, and seem to me that chess is hardly a 'limiting' game, as the number of possible variations of moves available over the course of a given game is astronomical.

[splice]

Oh, I absolutely agree. I don't see chess as limiting in any way. What's the difference between not being able to evaluate the million possible moves in chess as opposed to not being able to evaluate the trillion possible moves in go? The fact that one is harder than the other by a huge factor doesn't change the fact that we can't do either :). That sort of thing only comes up with computer programs to play chess and go, nothing human players should be concerned about. You develop skills to intuitively evaluate a position and possible moves, in chess as in go, and prune the tree yourself, so to speak. No one tries to run through every move to try and see what's best, and what would end up best in 4-5 moves from then.

Although, "limiting" in the sense that you can only move your pieces a certain way at any one point, sure, I could see that. But those are the rules, we're all playing games with a variety of limits like that, it's nothing bad.

---
Sebastien L.

[David Craik]

What's the difference between not being able to evaluate the million possible moves in chess as opposed to not being able to evaluate the trillion possible moves in go?

LOL...exactly what I was going to put in my next post. Whether or not one has a 'limited Western' way of thinking or not is irrelevant. One could devote a lifetime of study to either game. What was Othello's catch phrase..."Easy to learn, impossible to master"?


Life is open. You can do anything. It is more like Go than it is like Chess.

Nope. Life has rules too, as does any society.