Irish Open · 9. March 2004, 16:55
Go
The game of Go is a board game played primarily in Japan, China and Korea for thousands years. It is alson known as WeiQi and Baduk.
It is played by two people – one player takes black stones and the other white stones. The object of the game is to build territories on the board. Although the rules can be understood almost in a matter of minutes the complexity of the game is virtually unmatched. Computers are gradually improving and have reached the stage of strong amateurs. Unlike chess mere brute force (as used in IBM’s Deep Blue computer that beat Gary Kasparov) cannot be applied to Go. The branching factor on a Go board is too high. Players must employ a mix of pattern matching, intuition and experience in order to defeat their opponent.
As mentioned in my first post to robwall.com Go is one of the subjects I intend writing about here. I am a new player so all comments and feedback are very welcome and appreciated.
Irish Open
Last weekend I participated in the Irish Go Open. It was held in the Teachers Club (Club na Múinteoirí) in Parnell Square in Dublin. The competition was organised (very well!) by the committee of the Irish Go Association
I played 3 games in total, two on Saturday and one on Sunday (the more serious players, took part in all five rounds) and one of the speed rounds on Friday (which I also lost – I found it even more difficult to play under pressure than I did with time to think!).
These games brought my total number played on the full 19×19 board to a whopping 8. I was given a large handicap against most players (only one other player was realtively new to the game – 1 years experience so the handicap was reduced to 4). Those other more experienced players watching my moves all identified one key factor in my playing: when threatened with an attacking stone I am playing too close to my opponent. It is always better to build looser nets around stones you wish to contain.
During the tournament there was a seller from the British Go Association there. I bought myself two elementary books. I bought two elementary books that I have begun to read. The first covers Go openings and the second 38 common Joseki (corner plays). Already I’m beginning to see how my playing could be exploited by my opponent for great advantage. With a little study, hopefully my first win is not too far away…
Go online
This is a topic that I intend to return to – so I’ll be brief here. There are many, many web sites covering the game of Go. By and by as I collect links I will post the most useful of them to a page of my own. For anyone wanting to search for useful Go links I recommend you search for “go game” and so on – for obvious reasons the word Go alone is unlikely to throw up useful results. I also recommend you search for the other names: Baduk and WeiQi . These are often/usually included on good pages and so can be relied upon for good results.
Computer Go
As with Go online links, computer Go is a topic I will return to in the future.
Computer Go is actually how I became interested in the game. I noticed a paper as I was writing my thesis for my PhD that looked interesting. Not having the time for distractions I forgot about it until Christmas 2003 when I found a book ‘Teach Yourself Go’ by Charles Matthews. I bought the book and started playing soon afterwards!
The one link I will give here is for the Computer Go mailing list where those interested in writing programs for playing Go congregate and share ideas.
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