I like your comment Mike I had not thought about western philosophy. I see you mention beauty in Go, being a very basic player I find that difficult, although I know much about beauty in chess especially in composed problems.
It is struggle that often creates beauty. Nature in its struggle for survival presents us with endless beauty.
What I wonder is how great the advantage white gets in chess, and black in go form moving first. Usually in go they give white a 6.5 stone komi to compensate but what advantage does white get in chess from moving first.
What I wonder is how great the advantage white gets in chess, and black in go form moving first. Usually in go they give white a 6.5 stone komi to compensate but what advantage does white get in chess from moving first.
White gets a 38% chance of winning while black sits around 30% and the rest are draws. I looked at an opening book explorer and then took a rough guess. No compensation is given to black for this handicap.
The pieces (stones?) are boring. Look like a bunch of black and white m+ms. That's all I can comment on since I don't really know the rules. I checked Wikipedia's entry on the game....... The rules seem boring, too. There must be something to it, though, as 900 billion people play it worldwide.....
Where are the the other 894 billion people in the world hiding?
893* Billion.
I found out there are 2 local Go clubs and went to one yesterday evening. It was pretty nifty.
Yes, I'd say "helpful" is one of the positive remarks I can make about my first Go club experience. :)
This diagram shows shows the relative complexity and ease of programming for a variaty of games (including chess and go).
Latest brainwashing entry: I have dreamed about playing Go at least twice in less than a week.
I love go, and have currently been playing on the IGS server using the PandaNet GUI. However, I cannot find any good go sites on the internet. I would love something like chess.com, but any good tutorial site would do. I tried KGS, but the lessons were a bit too simple for me. Also, in the US, it is nearly impossible to get a coach or play in person, so it has to be entirely web-based.
Suggestions? Comments? Help Me! :)
I'm now encouraging a few local parents to introduce their kids to Hikaru no Go while the whole thing is on netflix streaming.
The local Go scene isn't as prominent as the (also small-ish) chess scene, and it's a bit of a shame the two groups meet at the same time in different places. I think I'll be spending some time with each group for a while.
Arimaa is also very difficult for computers. Has anyone else tried it?
Arimaa has a human vs. computer face-off every year, I'm wondering if Go has something similar.
Go is a game of sublime beauty and elegance that can not be appreciated unless one actually studies the game a bit and tries to play it seriously. The notion of ko fights is almost poetic, IMO, and is so very Japanese in its subtlety. The closest thing chess has is the cruder concept of zwischenzug, the difference being that a ko fight can last many moves and can involve many different areas of the board simultaneously.
I love chess, particularly for the extent to which we can fetishize the equipment of the game, but there really is no question in my mind as to the superior beauty and elegance (as a game design) of go.
Aside from the technical differences, I love them both, and don't care in the least about one better than the other, etc I took up Go and Chess up several years ago at age 51. I learned chess as a child, but never was serious about it,
relatively late in life (as these things go) at age 49 I started learning them both for them, and still at it (off and on) several years later.
Okay then.
mrguy is worried about a 2 year discrepancy in an old memory?! Sometimes I don't remember how old I am now to say nothing of how old I was in the past when I started doing something.
According to his profile it was only 5 (or 7) years ago though that was not really my point. I get how people can easily forget exact dates of things that happened many years ago. The real kicker is how his two comments were only 40 minutes apart.
The pieces (stones?) are boring. Look like a bunch of black and white m+ms. That's all I can comment on since I don't really know the rules. I checked Wikipedia's entry on the game....... The rules seem boring, too. There must be something to it, though, as 900 billion people play it worldwide.....
*Is shocked that he hasn't even tried igo*
I play both games, Chess at 1750 ELO and Go at 2 kyu. I also enjoy writing programs to play games (Connect 4, Othello, Checkers, Chess). So I felt in a good position to comment.
Chess is a great game. It suits our western philosophy where anything can be treated as a battle. Go on the other hand is more like world politics where it's perfectly acceptable to loose a local battle as long as you gain compensation that can be used elsewhere on the board. I actually think Go is a more beautiful game to look at but then a little understanding helps.
The advantage of chess in the West is that it's easy to find a decent oponent while finding any oponent in Go can be difficult. Obviously that reverses in the East. It's also quite an old game (1500yrs) that has stood the test of time. There are a few disadvantages to Chess - I personally don't like seeing draws (I think the number of drawn games practically killed of checkers) and it gives me an uneasy feeling knowing that computers play our "intellectual" game better than us.
The advantages of Go include a handicap system that allows me to have an equal game against players of widely different skills. Draws are very uncommon. It's also an ancient game most likely created around 4000 yrs ago. I can also easily beat any computer program even though a huge amount of work has gone into the programming the game. The big disadvantage is that just too few people play it over here.
Even taking More's law into account I don't feel either game is solveable and just creating a world champion program doesn't mean you've solved the game. So which game do I play when I go to the pub?
I prefer playing backgammon, preferably for money - go figure!