Go vs Chess

1. What are chess and go

Chess is a strategy game where on a 8 by 8 board you have six different types of pieces (pawns, knights, bishops, rooks, a queen, and a king) the goal of the game is to "checkmate" the opposing king who moves one square at a time by attacking him and all the squares that he can move to so that it is impossible for the opponent to prevent you from capturing it on the next turn. For more information go to FIDE Official Chess Rules. 

Go on the other hand is much simpler to learn, but can be very difficult to master, it starts on a 19 by 19 board and you take turns placing "stones" on each square until you run out and the person who surrounds the most territory at the end wins. If you want to learn more go to Wikipedia-Rules of Go.

2. Possible positions and game length.

Games can be as short as the first example or longer like this one altough even its short because the average chess game is 40 moves and the longest possible game is around 8850 moves long.In go the minimum amount of moves are 38, while professional games average 211 moves and the longest theoretical game is 1048  moves. As for the possible positions chess has between 10^43 and 10^50 possible chess games and there's about 10^170 positions.

3. Which game is harder

Both games are extremely difficult and far from being solved. For chess computers have been able to solve all positions with 7 pieces or less, but that took 140 terabytes of storage and that number grows exponentially so that in order for them to solve all positions with 8 pieces or less it will take a petabyte which is equal to 1 000 000 000 000 000 bytes. Deepminds AlphaGo in October 2015 was able to beat the best Go player Fan Hui in a game of go, but IBM's Deep Blue beat the best chess player at the time Garry Kasporov in 1996 19 years earlier although Garry Kasporov was able to still beat Deep Mind 4-2. Overall Go has many more positions, studying it is much more limited then chess, and computers struggled more to beat humans in it, but chess can be much more wild and tactical, so in my opinion Go is more difficult to master, although chess is easier to learn.

-Spowen34yu4t3