Blog
Go
Wednesday 7 March 2007
Spent an awesome lunch hour today playing Go for the first time. I’d never really gotten into any sort of strategy board game before, but I’ve wanted to learn the game for a while, ever since I took home the folding wooden travelling board that used to belong to my grandfather. So I brought it to the office for the heck of it, in case anyone else wanted to learn, but nothing came of it.
When we moved to our new office, in the back of a former factory, we and our landlord built the space pretty much from scratch, along with a kind gentleman who’s setting up a metal and wood shop downstairs. Turns out he enjoys Go, and he pointed me to some good resources on the web (see below).
It’s so very abstract, so uniform. There aren’t any special pieces with special moves. The rules take all of five minutes to learn, maybe ten if you count scoring. And I think part of the appeal for me is the astonishing complexity that arises from the implications of such pure, simple rules. I’m still getting the hang of it, of course, but I love it already.
I tried my hand at a few games against Goban, a Mac OS X Go engine that includes GNU Go and network play. Not bad for learning, but of course nothing beats an actual game with an actual human being.
So today we sat in the cozy café area out front with the noonday sun slanting in through the windows. We used a 13x13 board (using the full 19x19 board might have taken all day), and my friend pointed out strategies and taught me scoring, while our neigbours from the coffee trade wandered past on errands, occasionally carrying cockatoos and plumbing fixtures.
A couple of other friends have expressed interest, too, and there’s been talk of chess-playing too. Perhaps it’ll be the start of a new tradition around here.
The links:
- The Interactive Way To Go by Hiroki Mori - a primer with interactive Java examples.
- IGS Pandanet - Internet Go Server. Play and watch matches.
- More online play at the KGS Go Server.
- goproblems.com - an online database.
- GoBase.org - tons of articles, news, games.
- Sensei’s Library - a Go wiki.
- Influence Simulator - generates a pretty graphical representation of “influence” throughout a game, courtesy a club in Lyon.