Ask HN: Who Plays Go?
I'm not super incredible (maybe 2 dan). At my peak, when I was studying in Japan, I was close to 5 dan. A week before leaving Kyoto, I hooked up with a buddy (who was also visiting) to challenge the locals at a smoke-filled Go club. He was perhaps 2 dan at the time. We walked in and slaughtered the room. They could not match us. Ah, but they insisted we return the following evening.
We did.
Waiting for us were some of their strongest players. I was seated in front of Kyoto's most ruthless amateur player, who must have been a scrappy 7 dan. He was a squat old man with grizzly eyes and a staunch, "I'm gonna' mess you up" attitude. The desire for revenge in his gaze was unmistakable.
The knives came out, we threw down dragon after dragon, chase after chase, launching attack and counter-attack, the board was intense. Eyes of groups were abandoned, trades were made, and the shrewdness of his plays were like his gaze. In the end he won four out of five games, and I learned a lesson in humility. It was a great experience, would do it again in an eye-blink.
Go is such an amazing game, with a rich history, pervasive through Asia, and unsuspecting in its simplicity. It's also a great way to make friends around the world, and meet some truly remarkable people.
Any dan players care for a game?
98 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 157 ms ] threadI'm not very good though. Do you have any suggestions for improving?
http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html
2. Study tsumego (life and death) problems. By study, I mean keep replaying the same positions until you can identify the sequence to live (or to kill) immediately. Study problems slightly more difficult than your own rank (maybe 1 or 2 stones). Do this for 15 minutes every day for 6 months and you will be quite strong.
http://tsumego.tasuki.org/?page=tsumego
http://senseis.xmp.net/?BenjaminTeuber%2FGuideToBecomeStrong
3. Replay master games. Don't merely click through games on the computer. Get a board. Get stones. Feel the stones in your hand and think about where you would place each move. Try to discover, for yourself, why the master played the move.
http://www.kiseido.com/Game.htm
4. Study fuseki theory and master fuseki player games:
http://senseis.xmp.net/?TakagawaKaku
I'm probably 14 kyu.
http://igolocal.net/
Deep down I wish I still played ...
I actually played it instead of doing well in my math degree. I am only about a 4ku in real life (played in the odd competition). I gave up after the degree for similar reasons.
I love the game as compared to chess there is real strategy involved. I am dyslexic and I find calculating locally hard i.e the kind of calculating you do in chess (dyslexics are bad at sequencing). However, in go, you have full board considerations and I am above my grade in those. In go that means I need to take a lower (than my grade) handicap from stronger players but am bad at fighting.
I got to about 7 kyu, and then it suddenly hit me. Balance is key. Therefore you should concentrate on those aspects of your life which have become more urgent. I haven't played very much after that realization.
In my view, Go (or any other hobby, really) would stand in one corner of the board. Your family, personal life, and work would be at the other three corners. As the situation on the board evolves, you would choose your best play. Focusing too much on any one area would leave you over-concentrated. It would be too inefficient. You'd easily secure one corner but lose the other three.
But then, if you spread yourself too thin all over the place, trying to please everyone, including yourself, that would leave you with a vulnerable position that could fall apart at any moment. That's clearly not good either.
However, if you patiently settle your stone formations before moving on the next area, if you gain strength in one corner/side before expanding towards another, if you are fluid in your decision making process when choosing a direction (life does throw you stumbling blocks doesn't it?), THEN you'd be a wise man indeed :)
I do make it a point to participate in a local yearly tournament (five games over two days) whether I feel ready or not. One day, though, I will come back to Go in full-force.
I'm also ludwig on KGS, btw. If anyone fancies a game, you can always reach me via twitter (@ludwig1024).
That's certainly not how everyone looks at the game, but for me, go is easily the most enriching subject of study.
Just my 2c!
How do you come to terms with death?
Learn to play Go. The game has an opening, a middle-game, and an end-game. You can take them as metaphors for the stages of life.
The opening involves playing in the corners and around the edges of the board, perhaps on the third line emphasising territory, or on the fourth line emphasing influence. Metaphorically this is childhood and education. Perhaps going for a vocational qualification, such accounting or law is like going for territory, while studying philosophy or travelling round the world is like going for influence. Or perhaps such direct parallels are over-literal. The opening moves in a game are worse than difficult; the opening is down-right mysterious. Which makes it a lot like growing up. And it creates a situation as you enter the middle game that is different in every game. Much as every adult has their own baggage left over from childhood.
Perhaps the middle game is like adult life because things keep going wrong. Your opponent invades your territory or steals the eyes from a group. You have to fight back, invade his territory or sacrifice a weak group. Adult life makes similiar demands on your flexibility and fighting spirit. If you lose your job perhaps you can find a new one with a rival company for more pay. Or change career and become happier.
The middle game may see victory or defeat, just as life may come to a premature end in illness or death. Often though one survives to the end game. The boundaries of the territories must be decided and there is still time for ingenuity and an upset. It is the time of memoirs and collected works, of playing with grand-children and of making partial amends for past errors.
If you play in tournaments there is a clock, but it is set to 1 hour, not seventy years. There is time to think about your opening, to estimate the score and plan a path in the middle game, to look for some clever moves and to save time here and there with the obvious safe play. After 40 minutes you can estimate the score again. If you think you are ahead you can try to hold onto your lead through the end game. If you think you are behind you must chose between trying to catch up with some clever end game moves or perhaps a do or die invasion. Time matters. If you are short of time you will be unlikely to be able to think for long enough to come up with clever moves. But you should be ahead, having put the time to good use earlier.
Tournament play with 1 hour instead of 70 years is the heart of the metaphor. Both the game and real life have a narrative arc and time limits. You have to manage your time and act your age, taking the big points in the opening and leaving the end-game moves for the end-game, if you make it that far.
So my advice is practical advice and not the uplifting advice that you requested. It emphasises the practical issue of getting the hang of managing a limited stock of time.
There's a saying, "Go is life". Learning the game will tell you an incredible amount about yourself, about determinism and chance and skill, about depth and limits and building knowledge and passing on knowledge.
For a software person there is a lot to learn about complexity and patterns. There are deep lessons about not fooling yourself, about the idea that a strategy for success emerges in surprising ways from ridiculously simple rules and facts of the underlying material.
There isn't much of a gap between Go's simple rules (alternating play, capture, ko) and software's fundamental elements (sequence, iteration, choice) in terms of simplicity, and likewise these simple rules combine to yield complexities that challenge the best human minds.
Go beautifully combines strategy and tactics. In what other board games can you take a strategy like, "Besiege Wei To Rescue Zhao" and implement it, tactically, in various ways?
I had a conversation with a project manager. He said that we should zip the development source files over to the test machine. I suggested that the test machine should be outfitted with the repository client (CVS) because it would be simpler solution, technically. How the goal is accomplished is not nearly as important as the goal itself. Both zipping the source and executing a "cvs update" solve the problem. And both are tactical ways of solving the strategic problem: test the latest development version in an isolated environment that is similar to production.
In "Besiege Wei To Rescue Zhao" the strategic concept is to parry an attack on your forces by attacking a weak (yet slightly more valuable) enemy force. I like to think of it as the Three Kingdoms problem. Kingdom A and B are friends, but not Kingdom C. When Kingdom C attacks Kingdom B, Kingdom A can rescue B in two ways: running to B's defense or by counter-attacking Kingdom C. Counter-attacking is usually best, to avoid the least amount of bloodshed. After you've attacked a weak opponent group, you've managed to create a stronger position that you can leverage to support the group that was being assailed.
Other elements that Go and programming have in common: intuition, aesthetics, and recursion.
My older brother taught me to play when I was eight, and we played fairly equally for about 10 years, Then, within a year's time, I was consistently giving him 9 stones.
Also in the late 1970s, I wrote a Go playing program I called Honnibo Warrior which played poorly. I sold it cheaply for the Apple II (written in UCSD Pascal) and actually made some real money selling the source code.
The idea was more about the framework than the actual worker machines. The ability to add and remove different problem solvers on the fly appealed to me. One of the problem solvers, for example, could be your program, or GNU Go, or a program that runs ten Go playing AIs simultaneously, returning the "best" move from each.
I especially like the idea that this could be applied to anything, not just Go. I did something in this direction a few years ago with an a-life data processing platform that used SOAP to shard problems to groups of machines.
At that point there are two issues, firstly the protocol becomes a bottleneck if you're dealing in large datasets, and secondly if you're dividing something up spatially you still have to aggregate your results. It would be the same if you divided it problematically for Go moves, unless each algorithm could give a "confidence" indicator that could be used reliably so that the master engine would not have to montecarlo each result set. That could be done if the montecarlo was moved to the sub-servers to test their own moves before sending the moves back complete with percentage wins for direct comparison in the master engine. It would chew up a lot more cycles and mean more machines, but it would remove the post-processing bottleneck.
http://i.imgur.com/IZ52u.png
A list of 10 moves from 30 different machines, even using a heavy-weight protocol like SOAP, would be nearly instantaneous. I would favour a light-weight format such as JSON, though. For other applications, I agree, network bandwidth would be a possible bottleneck.
My initial idea was to have each engine return ten moves, in sequence, with the first move being most important. The moves need not be delivered simultaneously. The Master selects the lowest scoring move that was picked by multiple engines. Other ideas include weighting (the fuseki engine's input is not very important in chuban or yose), and imperative moves (death engine forces a play to save a 30 point group).
The Master would send requests for moves by submitting a board position and whose turn to play.
What I really like about the idea, though, is that anyone could develop an engine (in any language) that adheres to the protocol, and add it to the AI network. At any time.
P.S.
http://www.whitemagicsoftware.com/software/java/jigo/
All of the different solvers ran on the same machine, as far as I know.
It turns out that the Monte Carlo engines are doing far, far better than the grand hierarchical neural net designs of the past, though.
I'm "grooviest" on KGS. I'm only 7 kyu so you'll need to up-skill me to 1 dan so I can give you a nice game (hint hint). My relationship with Go is turbulent. Currently we are in an addictive (God, it's sooo addictive) phase and she is breaking my heart. My one regret in life is that I was 30 years old before I learned how to play. All those wasted years playing chess. sigh I recently moved from my native land of Ireland to snowy central Finland and one of the first things I did was find me a Go club - hello the Tengen Go Club of Jyväskylä, nice people all round.
Unfortunately there aren't too many Go players where I am, and this makes Go as a point of social focus difficult, as it often is in chess over here.
Put yourself on the map, just in case! http://igolocal.net/
You must mark a valid location on the Google Map.
I currently live in Bermuda and if there are any Go players out there traveling to or currently residing there I'd be down for a few games, I have a go board + stones.
I only reached around 10 kyu though; don't have the time for it these days.
though i do not play it online.
my dad thought me how to play it at the age of 8. for some time i played it at a go club, but that never really caught on. now i play with a couple of friends or with my dad.
If anyone's interested in a game, I can play most evenings, British time.
Could you please elaborate?
1. The rules of go are very simple. (Well, kinda. Use, say, the Tromp-Taylor ruleset.)
2. The resulting game is very subtle, in e.g. the following senses. (a) For any game, define an "increment" to be how much better you need to be than someone else in order to beat them 75% of the time. Then the number of increments between a total beginner and God is larger for go than for any other game I know of. (b) Same as (a), but this time define an "increment" to be how much better you can get with a week's hard work or something. -- That is, there's a lot to learn, and learning it really makes you appreciably better at the game.
3. The difficulty of the game isn't simply a matter of getting better at mechanical calculations: there's a whole lot of strategy and "good taste" and so on.
4. It seems to be an uncommonly beautiful game. Now, any good game is going to have some aesthetic appeal for its expert players. But it seems as if (a) really good go players get more out of it aesthetically than, say, really good chess players get out of chess, and (b) one starts seeing aesthetic value in the game earlier in the process of getting better than with most other games.
5. (This is, I think, mostly a consequence of #1.) It's a very flexible game: you can use a different size of board (changing how long a game takes and the tactics/strategy balance), or give one player a handicap (changing the balance between the two) while keeping the game substantially the same. This is convenient practically, and (for reasons I can't currently articulate) it seems to me that it indicates something deeper about the game: it's a kind of Platonic essence that can be instantiated in many different ways. (I wonder occasionally about playing go on a graph that isn't just a square grid. It seems like hexagonal go wouldn't be too big a stretch, whereas to make a decent hexagonal chess game you have to change lots and lots of things.)
6. (Related to #1, #4 and #5.) It's a game that can be played with enjoyment even by total beginners: it's much more approachable than chess, for instance.
7. Although there's a lot to learn about the game, the understanding:brute-facts ratio in what you need to learn is better than in, say, chess. You can play go very well while knowing scarcely any detailed opening theory, whereas to be any good at chess you need to learn a lot of lines.
By the way, one of the reasons I "like" Go (in a purely objective, looking from a distance without learning it kinda way) is that, from what I've heard, even average players can beat computers at the game. Obviously, this is mostly to do with accidental, mechanical facts about number of possible moves, but in an age where Chess has been "won" by computers, it is something of an appeal for me. Do actual Go players feel the same way?
Computer moves always looked unnatural to me, though, and you could often exploit this easily. I'd say most players are at least comforted by lack of computer headway into Go.
How about playing on a Penrose tessellation generated within some bounds, like a square or circle.
Come to think of it, I wonder what Conway's Life would look like if it were shoehorned onto such a graph. I'm not sure how one would define the neighborhood, but sounds interesting to explore.
(Be cautious about believing anything I say too much. I'm a pretty weak player.)
Go has a kind of deceptive shallowness. The rules are extremely simple[0]. You can see 90% of what’s going on on a given board in a few seconds. (The board looks like a simplified illustration of something else – like the phase portrait of an uglier game.) Another beginner and I can play a game that looks roughly like a game between masters, and with a heavy enough handicap we can even play a satisfying game with them.
What’s fascinating and addictive is that there’s no big secret. Learning go, for me, is reminding myself that it’s simpler than it looks. All I have to do is surround territory. It’s very, very hard. The last 10% of understanding a board takes decades.
0. The Tromp-Taylor rules, which you mentioned and serve as an excellent introduction for the curious hacker, are at http://homepages.cwi.nl/~tromp/go.html . Notice the 150-line Haskell version.
Computers are awfully predictable and have a hard time even on a 9 by 9 board.
Next up, I would look at checking out a local Go club, maybe read a book or two, maybe check out igs/kgs.
Move to a 13x13 when you want the game to get more complex. Raise the handicap again when you do so.
The Interactive Way to Go: http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/
Its also available in 32 other languages: http://playgo.to/iwtg/
--
Beyond that I recommend 9x9 games, on Windows download yourself a free copy of iGoWin: http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html or on OSX or Linux check out GnuGo.
--
There's also a Linux live cd/distro with lots of learning tools by the name of Hikarunix: http://senseis.xmp.net/?Hikarunix
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go
Life, my daughter, 2 personal projects and work got in the way.
I miss the social aspect of Go, I find the internet incarnations are too sterile. I love having a tea and a chat while playing, I spend enough time staring at the screen.
Would probably play again if I found the right group.
Pushing the upper kyus would require way too much work than I am willing to commit at the moment to the game.
Love Go, it is truly eye opening.
Talking about smoke, my Go teacher "Mr No" used to smoke 200 cigarettes a day in Go clubs in Korea.
The scene here fizzled a bit when a few events happened around the same time, involving babies and our strongest players. I much prefer to play in person than online, for the same reasons you mentioned.
I am planning on taking a trip next year, with a stop in Korea. Any recommendations for (smoke-free) Go clubs?
The little bit that I played was also online. I didn't (and still don't) know anyone that played, either in person or online, so I haven't had anyone I can just bombard with questions. Whenever I played online I just got slaughtered, and any pleas for "what am I doing wrong" generally went unanswered.
Occasionally, I'll hit up http://goproblems.com and I struggle with all but the most obvious answers.
Despite reading a book or two about the game, and the handful of games online, it just never clicked. But I remain fascinated by the game and am on the constant lookout for someone who actually knows how to play. It's been a while now since I last tried to play, but I'm always down.
You have the touch. Are you a professional writer?
http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/letters/
I was into the game enough that when I had a free week in a Japan, I spent it playing every day at a club.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings
The first ability people tend to lose after not playing is reading. That is, visualising a sequence of moves (without playing them) on the board and judging the positional value (similar to chess, but with astronomically more possibilities). Reading requires concentration, pattern matching (shape, tesuji, vital points), and guesswork.
After reading -- the tactical part -- some higher-level concepts get lost. Forcing plays (kikashi), inducing moves, estimating the value of thickness, obscure joseki, fuseki theory, and more.
There are /so/ many concepts and techniques to Go that unless you are actively studying and playing, it is nearly impossible to keep everything at the forefront of your mind.
Later I came to Japan to study Computer Go in grad school. I planned to to stay for 2~3 years. It's been 7 years now. I don't play go anymore, but I do harder stuff (karaoke, clubbing, etc). It's been a sort of gateway drug for me.
PS: by the way, the reason an American 2-dan can slaughter a Japanese 2-dan is simply because the scales are different, mainly due to inflation in Japanese ranks. If you're AGA 2-dan (or say, European 1-dan) you should really upgrade yourself to 4-dan when coming to Japan.
Did you join one of the go cram schools?