Abstraction: GO

I love Go. For the uninitiated Go is an ancient...

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I've long aspired to become better at Go, but have had neither the ambition nor the regular opponents to make it happen. There was a Go club at one of the nearby universities that used to meet in a (now closed) coffee shop on a weekly basis and I made it there a couple times, but that's as close as I ever came to finding a regular group that was interested. And then I got distracted by other things.

What occurs to me about games like Go and chess and other classic abstracts is that they've been developed to such a science that if you want to really play, you have to play all the time, and I find myself wanting to play a variety of things too often to narrow my window that much. I'm still interested. I've just never been able to get over my various hurdles.

Go is absolutely brutal. I feel like with chess you can learn the moves and 2 novices can gave fun. But with go the applications are so layered that it really needs a lengthy tutorial period to click.

It also sets up a nice east/west philosophical division IMHO. Sun Tzu's Art of War versus Clausewitz' On War. No front line in go, it requires a much more distributed plan of conquest than chess. Fascinating game and one that has an amazing tactile nature to it as well.

I absolutely love that Kageyama book. Great call out!

I've always felt that if we contact an alien species, Go is one of the very few games we will have in common. It's simplicity and depth transcends.

If you've haven't read it, Master of Go by Kawabata is the best novel I've ever read about the experience of playing a game.

jason10mm wrote: Go is absolutely brutal. I feel like with chess you can learn the moves and 2 novices can gave fun. But with go the applications are so layered that it really needs a lengthy tutorial period to click.

QFT. I picked up Go on a whim from a bookstore and thought it was really fascinating. I quickly got good enough to make my friends not want to play with me. Then I decided to play online and got steamrolled so badly, by some of the lowest-ranked people on the server, that it was just completely demoralizing. I didn't even understand what I did wrong. I tried one more time, and after the fifth move my opponent just quit the game because I wasn't good enough.

So now I don't play. I miss the idea of it, and it's still a fascinating ruleset -- it feels discovered rather than invented -- but playing it was just miserable.

dysjunct wrote: I tried one more time, and after the fifth move my opponent just quit the game because I wasn't good enough.

See, that's just bizarre to me. I trained at an aikido dojo for a dozen years. For the last few, I was regularly teaching classes in slots where the main instructor couldn't make it. Teaching was always a hugely eye-opening experience for me, because you see things from an entirely new perspective. ("So THAT'S why that works-! [To students] I mean... That's how that works! See? Just like that.") You were playing on the lowest level of the server and someone decided they couldn't take 20 minutes for a game with you and perhaps give you some pointers on placement and territory? I wonder if they were just masochistic enough that they only wanted to play people who were vastly superior so they could get their heads kicked in the way you were? Strange.

But, yeah. I sympathize. I lost all the time at that club I mentioned, too.

I play at littlegolem.net/

Send Jonathan N. an invite.

I played quite a bit online ten years ago with mixed results. There is a saying in Go it is good to lose your first 100 games fast. I definitely did that.
I gave up on online play mostly because on the few occasions i was winning live games my opponents sometimes just ran down the clock hoping i would quit or lose connection. This really annoyed me so I packed it in and never picked another site.

Jackwraith wrote: What occurs to me about games like Go and chess and other classic abstracts is that they've been developed to such a science that if you want to really play, you have to play all the time...

I think this idea holds me back from diving into Go but I know it shouldn't. I can have some fun and challenge playing Go casually. I don't need to think that it's pointless since I'll never study enough to make at least 1dan or whatever. Playing a little bit of Hex somewhat recently got me over that hump I think, as I'm pretty terrible at it but still had fun against people that were at a similar experience level as myself.

I found the AlphaGo documentary really well done and fascinating.