Go! - The Board Game (PC and Internet versions too)

bm

Bill, if you get a chance, take a look at that wikipedia article about Go.

I was shocked to learn how old it is and how wide spread it is in the asian communities. It has quite a philosophical and military following also.

I'd not heard of it before today.

I read up on it last night and the fact that a computer can't beat the average player is fascinating to me, having long been devastated in Chess by computers. It's hard to imagine a game so simple being so tough to master. I'm going to try, unsuccessfully, not to try. :wink:

Go is pissing me off. I just won a 9X9 game but for the life of me can't figure out why. It seems I was behind in captures and we about split the territory, but it reports I won by a margin of 4.5. I don't get it.

Earlier, after I offered to resign against a player when I was clearly over-matched, he was kind enough to explain nets and eyes with a visual tutorial and I learned much. But I'm still having trouble with implementation and figuring out how the game is scored.

You got hooked too?

clap clap!

playing is the best way to learn it. the more you play the closer will come the time you begin to feel the rythym of the game on an instinctive level and realize with almost instantaneous mental uncomfort a wrongly placed stone, its akin to having your subconscience screaming out to your conscience mind, "idiot!"

once you get to that point the game opens up to you and you begin to see its real beauty.

if you have golfed its like knowing immediately during your swing that you didn't hit the ball right. or a basketball player knowing his shot won't sink as soon as the ball leaves his finger tips

the game sure makes you think in a flowing, meshing manner where straight ahead aggression is rewarded much less than convoluted and delicately balanced planning. its not so much that you need to plan moves and moves ahead but have the mental elasticty to seize open opportunities and exploit them when they are presented.

i had to stop playing late at night because it was like playing the slots, even when you lose you think "the next time i'll win!" and it would be 4am when i walked away from the pc.

even a small distraction, say, the sound of my air conditioner compressor switching on has distracted me and broken my train of thought and now when I play I turn off the tv and radio.

Thanks a lot Kuvasz. This game is driving me crazy! Do you recommend bots to start, or people? So far, I only beat the retarded bots and people.

Go was quite popular at the university when I taught there in the 80's(early 90's (thought I never really played it myself).

It's played in a couple of youth cneter here regularily as well (chanpionships etc) since about that time.

son, now in a era that speaks highly of personal resposibility I want you to remember I warned you of the addictive nature of the game.

but I am glad you like it...,. but it'll make you think like a liberal..... complicated, multilayered, sensitive to change, and flexible to exploiting new opportunities.

The 9X9 game increases the ratio of the "corner" to "middle of the board" game and with the "corners" aspect as the far more difficult part of the game to learn, the 9x9 board is like a Go Bowflex machine and emphasizes the most difficult part of the game to master.

As I said before, I would stick with the 9x9 igowin game until I had a sense of where I was with the game and work on my "corners" play until it was too not bad, I moved back to the 19x19 real board that had really stumped me when I first took up the game and after playing hundreds of 9x9 igowin games going back to the standard 19x19 board was like moving from Manhatten to the Grand Canyon.

The only people I have played are locals, none of whom had any experience on the small 9X9 board software until I told them of it and their corners game were pretty weak.

as far as figuring out the scoring, remember to count the "liberties" of your stones, know correctly what constitutes "captured" spaces around the edges of the board and really concentrate on learning your corners skills (really the ways the stones are configured three deep from the edge of the board to protect them from being captured..... you'll just have to memorize the spatial arrangements that keep them alive and once you do, you move your stones that way as easily as hitting a free-throw) by then you'll be advanced enough to move down and play on a 5-8 kyu level of the igowin software within a hundred or so games.

and don't be opposed to just play games making outrageous moves just to see what happens. you can learn from even cavalier movements you make on the board since they can reveal the wild permutations that lie just below the surface of the game.

Advice appreciated... thank you much. I think I'll go get my A$$ reamed again. So far the retard computer is way too easy... and the rest of them make me the retard.

My wife got me interested in Go. She was born in Shanghai. My in-laws gave me a game made in Beijing (one basket with black stones, one basket with white stones, and a 19 x 19 cloth board that can be rolled up). Chinese rules are slightly different than Japanese rules. (I believe the Japanese rules are more commonly used.)

I played my father-in-law and he allowed me to get a draw. However, the husbands of my wife's girlfriends can beat me fairly easily. These guys also spend a lot of time playing Go on the internet (but their wives complain about that).

Hey Bill, where are you playing? I looked at the Yahoo version of Go but from what I can see, you can only play against another human, not the computer. Right now I'd just really embarrass myself playing with a human. I want to learn some basics with a computer first.

Anyone know of a site with online GO games that let you play against the computer and have a beginner level?

I've been using that igowin downloaded program, but don't like the stagnant 4 black to 1 white starting point.

I play at the KGS SERVER. I still stink too. Probably at about a 26k level (30 is the worst). I play as OCCOM_BILL. See you there!

you decrease your black stone numerical advantage as you win and at the 12kyu level it is a one-to-one match, at the 8 kyu level you switch to playing the white stones and function at a opening move disadvanatage per the software.

at the highed kyu levels just work on the basics until you can anticipate the foe's movements; as you move to lower kyu values the game gets harder... honestly it will take you scores and scores of games to learn enough and anticipate the foe to get down to a moderate teen-kyu. once in a while you'll see that in winning a game you might move from a 22 kyu to an 17 kyu or from a 19 kyu to a 15 kyu level, that means that according to the software you did something really good and began playing at a more sophisicated level than the current game was set at initally and the software reset its difficulty level. when that happens it is best to review your game to see where you acted so brilliantly!

kuvasz, I'm curious what you Kyu level is, or are you advanced beyond that measurement and if so; how far?... If you don't mind my asking.

advanced? oh no, grasshopper.

this game humbles you like the smile on the face a beautiful blond girl in a distracted second. usually i don't stop playing until I am down (or up) to a 6 kyu level.... 8kyu or below level is when you start playing the white stones, and screws you all up since you are used to playing black stones at higher kyu levels

just after i posted my earlier remark i opened my board and had it open at 5kyu and promptly lost about 5 straight games then worked back down to 5 again in about another 10 more games... i just pulled down my statistics (see the "view" tab it tells you your avg and best game), i had wiped out my hard drive over thanksgiving with the pc in the repair shop fixing my hard drive and reloaded the igowin software about 7 weeks ago. my average now is 7kyu + 0.12 over 110 games with a low of 3kyu.... (but i bet it took playing a thousand games to get good enough to get that low over the last years) i was on a real groove when i got that low and had worked at getting that low over several consequtive hours of playing time

I had not played any games in several weeks and lost my edge and was mad as hell about it... addictitve as a greasy potato chip.

but once you start to feel the game again you stop making dumb mistakes. and that is what is so brutal, one misplaced stone early on ruins you and you have to get in a groove and "feel" when you have "captured space" advantages..... usually, i "eyeball" the captured spaces and don't count them. that's what i mean about building a "sense of where you are" about the game

i gotta' start playing more, losing sucks and i have not been able to win much below 5kyu and figure that i am missing some technique or insight that a <5kyu level player needs to know about.

all i have done is read some texts and played like hell on the igowin but i did not want to embarrass myself playing others on-line until i could constantly win games at the 1kyu level on the igowin software.

moving from the quick and dense 9x9 igowin board to the real 19x19 board was really freaky when i played this summer with a few college guys down at a coffee bar in athens. beating them and in the fashion it was done made me realize what a good tutorial igowin is to work on.

i dont know if this software is compatble with a blackberry but as soon as i get one i'll try it.

update... I just found the books I heard about Go they are some damned fine sci-fi from David Wingrove called the "Chung Kuo" series sbout a futuritistic world where the chinese rule. they have 5-6 volumes and use Go to help the reader realize the convoluted plot within plots of a terrorist organization. I read the first one back in '94 and checked out Go then.

Fascinating it could be so difficult. I don't see too many 1k's at KGS Server, so you may not want to wait that long. Most seem to be between 5k and 15k which makes it difficult for me to find an opponent. Amazingly, most don't want an opponent +/- more than 1k, so I gather 1k is a huge jump. I also notice that most players are exceedingly nice and helpful. A few players have taken time after stomping me to use the software to show me errors and strategies... and the way it is set up... it's as if the site was designed with this in mind. There's like a dozen different tools you can use to mark up a game after it's over, to learn or teach where errors are made or opportunities are missed. Pretty cool, but awfully time consuming. I find myself longing for a game of Chess, where I have at least a shot at beating everyone I've ever encountered and can easily recognize my mistakes. This game makes me feel STUPID.

You guys make me feel like an idiot newbie. I impress myself if I can just get one capture, much less win a game. Won two so far and that's about the best I've been able to do so far.

You're right about needing to be in a place of mind where there are no distractions and you are totally focused on the game. My biggest problem has been unlearning the Othello gaming strategies.

dont worry about capturing opponents since they are only a part of your score, and usually account for a lower ratio of value per game score than "captured spaces"... along the way to securing your empire you will conquer. but never attack other stones just to conquer them.

think along these lines.... you want to conquer as much territory as you can in as few moves with the least number of stones and if in the course of doing so you get to snag some of the enemy go for it! but don't embark on attacking opponents over building your defense and plans to conquer spaces... its like the Wehrmacht driving on to Paris instead of attacking any French Army unit they saw. Paris was the object, ie. land and territory, and to hell with the actual soldier.

protect your stones by using a sort of enfilide cross fire that protects the liberty of your stones from attacking adversarial stones, and is akin to arranging your pieces the way one does to cause "check" in chess.

the way to do this is to set such "cross-fire" one layer back or over from your advanced stone line, with double "cross-fire " around your ends. having your ends turned is like having the Goths plunder the Roman Empire. once in, they can run all over the place..... When thinking of protecting your ends...... think of Little Roundtop and Col. Joshua Chamberlin at the Battle of Gettysburg!

the skill is to have enough geometric insight to maxmize these "cross-fire' features, if you play chess its like attacking with "knights," the two -up, one-over vision thing.... that geometric insight is approximately the way you design your protection patterns not as a bishop's diagonal or rook's linear attack. so you just get experienced that way of arranging your stones..... its feeling is that they are placed at maximum efficiency, and with enough time you will begin to feel instintively about this balance.

and that's the game, balance....

the game is so fundamentally logical as a military (or otherwise adversrial contest) you sometimes fail to see the forest for the trees. remember is it better not to kill or be killed when avoidable and being forced to do so means someone errored. work on building your defenses and pay particular attention to keeping your ends from being turned.. advice that goes back to at least the time of alexander the great.