What is this?
Go is a strategic board game, very popular in Asia.
It has originated in China more than 4000 years ago (around 2300 bc.).
This is how typical go board (called goban) and the game in progress looks like:
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| Beautiful, isn't it? |
Black and white stones are played on the intersections of lines on the goban. The classical board has 19x19 lines, which gives us 361 possibilities to place a stone. Once it’s played, it cannot be moved around the board - it can be only removed by an opponent.
The purpose of the game is to surround territory on the board, which means that you really don’t have to kill your opponent in order to win the game. You can capture many of opponent’s stones and yet still lose the game because of the territory you’ve got.
By gained territory I mean each empty intersection that’s surrounded by stones of one colour.
Here on this simplified small board, black has surrounded 6 empty intersections, which gives him 6 points, and white has got 5 points in total.
I don’t want to bore you with all the rules, but I can assure you that those are very, very simple.
You can learn how to play in 5 minutes, but it is lifelong study to master the game.
What makes it different?
- go is peaceful and balanced. It focuses on learning how to share the board with your opponent, not smashing him, because the board is simply too large for one player to gain all territory for himself. If you chase and attack your opponent too aggressively, you often lose because of losing focus on territory (your opponent may simply defend and strengthen his positions while creating thick walls encircling some territory). You need to learn how to not be greedy and not take everything for yourself. It’s great tool for character development. Also, there has been some studies on brain activity during the game. It’s said that go players use both right and left hemisphere (compared to chess, where mostly left is used).
- go is still a challenge for AI - no existing computer program can beat the best human players yet. Of course the progress of go programs skills is visible and still growing, but still they stand no chance against best humans. It’s partly due to the huge complexity of the game (too many possibilities to simply brute force it), and partly due to the character of the game. Often even best players cannot precisely explain why some move is considered as good or the best for a given position. They very often talk about intuition behind their tesuji (“best move”). Each single stone, once placed, has so many possible continuations, that it’s required to “read” ahead about 100 moves (including your opponent proper responses!) in order to determine whether it’s good or bad for you.
- go is considered as a professional occupation in Asia. Which means, that if you’re good enough, you can earn money (a lot of) by playing or teaching go. In China, Korea and Japan there’s big business build around the game - dedicated TV channels, newspapers, books, clubs, schools, big tournaments with many sponsors. You need to start early if you plan the professional career, often by the age of six or seven.
- go sets can be itself a piece of art and happen to be very, very expensive.
Go in popculture
There is very interesting and fun anime and manga about go, called Hikaru no Go. If you’re fancy of japanese animation, you need to watch it :)
A great gain of new players has been observed in Japan after it was released, especially among children.
Several movies have referenced go (A Beatiful mind, Pi, Hero).
If a typical go is too mainstream...
you can play one colour go:
blind go (no goban needed!), torus go (where goban doesn’t have borders) and even 3d go:
I deeply encourage you to watch the short trailer of the newcoming documentary about go:
Comments
I would really like to try go someday because it looks like a challenging game that really involves your intellect in 100% and that’s what I like. But as I said we shouldn’t feel inferior that we didn’t invent such game in our culture. Chess is a similar game, although the chessboard is smaller, the variety of chess pieces movements makes it virtually impossible to play two identical games. And as in go it also require significant amount of thinking to win.
The trailer have shown main difference between east and west cultures. Asians are very serious about anything they do even if it goes about game they try to be perfect and always win, Americans treat games as "game" nothing really important. That is why it will be hard for them to compete with each other.
Go seems to be challenging game and I like the aspect of balacing your efforts during the play. I think we can learn a lot from eastern countries and Go is a perfect example.
If you'd ever like to play irl, there're some go clubs in Warsaw and also torunaments every month. See you there, maybe ;)
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