Go VS Chess

Go has opening theory, middle game theory, and endgame theory, just as chess does. Stone placement is not entirely static because stones can be captured. This single fact makes go dynamic since a stone structure (and therefore the territory it encloses) is only sound as long as all of its stones are immune from capture. If not, then entire regions of territory can suddenly open up and become contested again as stone structures disintegrate because of one tiny weakness. Anyone who thinks go is simpler, less dynamic, or easier to master than any other abstract strategy game simply knows very little about it. Chess, for instance, does not have "ko fights" which can be happening in multiple locations on the board simultaneously. So much for superior dynamism. Life and death problems are similar in nature to checkmate problems, but they exist potentially all over the board. Imagine if you had to figure out how to trap and checkmate five different kings in chess. I suppose it is human nature to aggrandize the game we grew up with over a game from a different culture, but I find that tends to place blinders that makes it difficult for people to understand and appreciate any game's finer qualities. I suggest that anyone who wants to speak authoritatively about go become at least a high kyu player first.

Am in agreement that it doesn't really matter which one is harder, they each possess a complexity that probably 99% of us will never fully grasp.  There are many chess players who play go and go players who play chess, the two games distinctive in their characteristics are both rich in strategy, tactics and beauty.  The notion that chess is more intense then go seems, well, kind of silly to me.

Some of the players here dont have a clue about Go because they dont play it.  Go is much much deeper than chess. You cant cheat.  What you see is what you get with Go.  Go is harder than chess yet easier to read and study and learn from the board because the static nature of the game.  And Go is more fun because you can be really creative in how you play the game.  Overall, Go is much more worth time spending on than chess because it will influence your interactions with other people in life.  Go is the ultimate training tool, worth $$$.  If anyone wants study tools or where to play, go to my page, or send me a message, I have tons of tools that are free as links to pages on the net.

I play chess960 on here cause it is fun, but I dont study chess as it is largely a waste of time aside from the checkmate problems.  Opening theory is nonsense.

The guy Plutonia doesnt find the deep emotions in the game of Go because he doesnt know what he is looking at and how the pieces placed represent emotions-and they do.  BIG TIME.  I can instantly tell what a player intends for me-every time- and I can also feel the emotions behind EVERY MOVE, and for this reason there are some players that I wont play or I quit playing because I dont like how they think-I basically tell them to stick it and then I quit.

Some people here also say that chess is to destroy and Go to build.  Sort of.  The opening in Go is sort of like the end game in chess and the opening in chess is like the end game in Go.  That being said, chess is more like a polite argument with certain rules about what can be said and when, whereas Go is more like a chaotic hand to hand knife fight to the death.

What exactly is taught with Go?  Go teaches you creativity, discipline, patience, precision, and the concept of accepting that you must always play the very best move, the move that your opponent can expect, knows will happen, and yet is powerless to stop.

I prefer Go to chess because it teaches you to nail people to the wall in negotiations even before the negotiation has started.  Go is deadly.  Chess is not.  Period.

^ Many of the things you say about go are the exact same thing I would say about chess. I don't find any "emotion" when you have hundreds of little pieces all alike that are working towards a not really clear result. Compare it with chess where you have "your guys" that are hellbent on killing the enemy king.

 

But I want to listen to your opinion, so I ask you, please post here a problem/composition/tactic that you think shows the creativity or, why not, even just the aesthetic aspect of the game (it doesn't have to be difficult).

You can take a screenshot from whatever program/website and upload it as an image.

 

For both chess and go we could post countless examples of course. But let's just pick one for argument's sake.

For chess I choose this one, taken from a recent Danny's video:

 

I had to post my opinion here, because there is a lot of confusion about go:

First off, who told you it's not clear who wins the game? That just shows that you know nothing about the it! Of course you know who wins, and, unlike chess, there's no chance to draw (well, unless you have a triple ko or something but it's a really remote possibility).

Second, no emotions? Again, you have no idea of what you are talking about. It's like a kid watching two old mans playing chess that says: "Boring!".

Third. The game of go is much deeper than chess, and that's a fact. THAT DOESN'T MEAN it's necessarly a better game, you don't judge games by their complexity.

That said, I'll tell you why I personally like Go over  Chess.

1) In chess, whoever has white has one move advantage and that's not fair. In go, if you have white (you start with black in go) you have a 6.5 points (called komi) advantage so that both players have equal chances to win.

2) In Go, you can give handicap stones to your opponent or give them an higher komi when you know they are weaker so you can still have an even game.

3) Chess is about tatics, go is about tactics too, but it also has a strong strategy component (I don't want to start a flame war about this, for clarification sake, strategy is how you manage a war, tactics is how you manage a battle, they are military terms). For those who doesn't play go it's hard to understand but imagine that every fight in go it's like a chess game. You can have multiple fights at the same time going on and playing one fight means ignoring another that you can potentially lose. It's up to you to decide which fight is more important while you think of a tactic to win them all. It's said that playing chess it's like playing a battle, playing go it's like playing an entire war. I couldn't agree more.

3) There's much more freedom in go. At the beginning, you can chose to play one out of 361 moves. While only 41 of them are considered "right" all the other moves (except for first and second lines I suppose) can't really be considered wrong. It's much more difficult to force a move in go, simply because your opponent can just say "you want that stone? go ahead and take it I'll play a 10 points move elsewere!". 

I'd like to go on and on but this is getting ridiculously long.

I just want to respond to Plutonia: Just look for life and death problems and you will find plenity of examples of how complex yet elegant the game is. But while the solution to your problem leads to victory (checkmate), the solution to go a problem leads to a local victory (a group of stone dead or captured), which might even be bad for the rest of the game. That's the beauty of go!

P.S. I don't speak english very well so I apologize if I made mistakes.

Maybe a whisper of understatement? ;)  Thank you for your eloquent and thoughtful post, the last couple ones had left a bad taste in my mouth and was a little sad to see the thread end? that way.  But it hasn't thanks to you.   Some, in their zeal to state their case (on either side) seemed to be doing themselves more harm then good (just my opinion).  Anyway, its always a pleasure to see Go and Chess getting on, especially in the same room.  

 

Woulnd't worry too much about your english, your command of it is superior to many for whom it is their native tongue.  Hope to see more posts from you here as you continue to work with the language. :)

Some nice go art (think was the creator of KGS posting on one of the go forums where I got this).

 

all this applies to chess as well.

Maaaaaannn, I just typed up a nice, lucid medium-lemgth post, but didn't save it in Notepad. Lost it. Aint doing it again, so I'll paraphrase:

1) GO is about 3 times as complex/dfficult based on the number of levels between the best and worst players based on win %, with Chess at 12 levels and GO at 40. A level is 2/3 winning %, I believe. The difference betweeen n^12 & n^40 is 28 digits my friends. GO is radically more complex.

2) Computers probably could solve Chess w/the best current technology, cooperative calculation, and a very long, but finite, amount of time, but it's a truly astronomical amount of calculations. GO on the other hand, if you calculate the amount of time for electrons moving near the speed of light to move the miniscule distance in a theoretical best chip would actually take a longer time than light crossing the distance of the entire universe as it is expanding. It can't be done. It requires a breakthrough in technology and a vast, vast amount of time.

All that said, I prefer Chess. 

Thank you splitleaf for your compliments ^_^

There is another thing I forgot to mention by the way. Someone here said that beginning to play go is easier than chess because of the small set of rules (well, tecnically go has got just one rule, two if you consider ko). That's not the case, really. When you start to play chess it's clear that the goal is to capture the king, so the only questions you have are something like: "how do you move the knight again?". In go however, in your first games you feel completely lost. The goal of the game can be a little confusing and the concept of life is kind of odd until you are familiar with it.

It took me something like 30 games just to understand how a game work in go. Chess is much more straight and intuitive despite the larger set of rules.

@plutonia: if you want to have an idea of what's in a go player mind as he plays you should look this guy: he comments his games as he plays, it's really entertaining even if you don't know much about the game (well maybe it's hard to understand what he says but whatever, he's fun so you won't get bored). Be sure to watch the review at the end of the game.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v152o6NPdaU

I mentioned earlier that the game of Go is easier to play than Chess in the beginning.  Both games makes you feel lost once you start playing it but as mentioned, Go is about many battles throughout the board.  You win some in Go and you start to get the hang of it.  With Chess, the goal is to capture the king but there are many ways to do this, just like how there are many ways to win the battles in Go.  In Go it is a lot easier to win the battles than to checkmate the king in chess on your first games.  Not knowing how to use the knight is a prime example of how Chess is more complicated on the first few games...and fun.

I propose a question.  How many moves does it take to make the quickest victory in a Go game?

You mean barring resignation, which could occur at any time? It is hard to imagine any real go match that reaches the point of scoring taking less than many dozens of moves. There is no equivalent to Fool's Mate in go, for instance.

I think that the fool's mate example strengthen my point: You can indeed make your first 4 or 5 moves in go so wrong that you could have potentially lost the game. The difference is that in go you have no idea you just lost! That's why it's harder. In my personal experience understanding chess was easy, I stared at go games for 3 weeks before getting a clue of what was going on. Maybe I'm stupid but chess are much more intuitive in my humble opinion.

A chess game that reaches checkmate in 5 moves is conclusively and immediately a victory. A go game that is halted after five moves has not reached a conclusive point of victory because there are still ample opportunities for players to make mistakes or surprising comebacks. I guess it depends on what you mean by "make a victory".

@ Plutonia:  You said:  "Compare it with chess where you have "your guys" that are hellbent on killing the enemy king."  Sorry, I just dont get that excited about chess given that the limitation of the game's starting position doesnt allow the players inherent unconscious mind to influence the opening very much.  Chess is like a debate.  Go is the closest thing you can get to a knife fight without actually getting knife wounds.  Mentally speaking Go is much much like real combat without the relaxation and non realism that international chess provides.  Seriously on what army is the second in charge a strong woman?  This is seriously laughable.  The Chinese say the same thing about international chess.  Try playing Xiangqi, chinese chess, its horribly hard, even much harder than Go.  Chess has its place, but alas the non involvement of the right hemisphere of the brain in addition to the highly tactical nature and non deepness of the game make it hard to grow with the game. And contemporary chess analysis hardly makes efforts to explain why each move is either offensive or defensive or long range implications, because that is next to impossible, as the pieces move, while in weichi or go, they cannot.  Therefore it is more suitable to train easily with go on say for example, move 50 had this implication here locally and globally, etc etc etc...

The picture of the chess board you put is quite simplistic.  Try multiplying this about 20 times(at least) for a 19x19 board and you have wei-chi during a typical game.  This is why Go is more exciting.  You are not limited to one drawn out situation.

All this being said, the reality that chess materials are more accessible than Go materials is especially comforting should the internet implode, if there is a world war, if the power goes out, etc, then I could study the many chess books with a board.  This is how it was in the past, there wasnt much available, and as such chess offers a rich experience independent of technology.  At the same time I also have tons of books on weichi and problems, so I could study those too.

I have included a paste from one of the sites with very very strong players from mainland China.  Enjoy.  And no the file editor on implementing documents on this site(chess.com), sucks, so here is the link:   http://www.wuzheng.me/g90747

If you don't think chess is deep strategically, then sadly you don't know chess.  It is more tactical than go, yes.

As for computers and future of both games, although go has richer tree (# of possible games), go is much easier "algorithmically compressible" than chess.

Both games can't be solved by stored databases (go even less likely than chess), because the huge time and data space consumed.

IMO, go can be solved by finding exact formula for the best move (using e.g. matrix operators) while chess can't.

Oh, I appreciated reading gianpasd and zazen5 posts. It's interesting to know the point of view of Go players.

Still, the points that you brought are not really exciting to me. Go is more complex yes, but this is a weakness and not a strength.

You know why Capablanca/Gothic chess never became popular? Because it is seen as an unnecessary complication (not even counting how it would mess up the relationship of the pieces: in a bigger board a bishop would be superior to a knight).

So what if in Go you can play different battles in different sides of the board? That would be like if I played 3 chess games at the same time thinking that it would make the game more fun. The point is, how complex and exciting are the individual battles?

The strength of chess is specifically that there are relatively few pieces on the board, that move and capture in a really simple manner, and the possibilities surrounding these pieces are incredibly complex. The relationships of the pieces are such that almost every battle features unbalanced armies: bishop vs knight, pawn structure vs king safety, pawn vs piece activity, bishop pair vs pawn majority...and this is just to list the most common that happen virtually every game.

And the magic of chess is that even at the highest levels so many unbalanced positions are perfectly playable.

The draws are what makes chess great. A beginner might think that a draw is a game where nothing really happen, like in a football match, but reality is that in chess even the person who is worse can still fight tooth and nail for not losing. Ever studied e.g. bishop vs rook endgames? it's amazing to me that even such an unbalanced material that can be absolutely crushing in one position can be an easy draw in another position, just if the defender has the knowledge and the foresight of following the right plan.

What are the imbalances in go? It's always X number of stones vs X number of stones. Unless of course somebody decides to play at odds.

And about white having an advantage, it's a great thing that again makes the game more exciting because 1 game you play with a slight advantage, the other you play the underdog.

In short, if a game is too complex simply because it's bigger it just becomes confusing and less clear. Chess is so deep in its simplicity. Perfect mix of strategy where a weak square will make you suffer 10 moves from now, and tactics so elegant and decisive that give you a sense of power when you execute them.

Imbalance must be an overused word in chess.  

Anyhow, I think Go and Chess are two different games. Comparing them is pointless. The rules are different. The boards are different. The pieces are different. Chess is closer to Shogi and Xiangqi rather than Go.

About computer Go, I think it's just a matter of time before computer catches up.

And no I am not a Go player. Despite my super-duper cool username, I don't know how to play Go. 

It is easy to fail to "see" things in Go, just as it is in chess. Probably easier since it is harder to keep track of the state of 361 board locations than a mere 64. Even pro Go players occasionally miss something as simple as a group in atari, or blunder by inadvertantly putting their own group into atari.