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Go is an astonishingly simply game. The actual rules involved can be understood by anyone. Essentially, players take it in turns to place their pieces (called 'stones') on the intersections of a grid of lines. The grid is usually 19x19 lines. If a stone or group of stones is completely surrounded by stones of the opposing colour, they are removed. The game ends when both players pass in turn. The winner is decided by counting the territory belonging to each player.

Despite this simplicity, Go is a challenging game for a number of reasons. One has to think on many levels at once; at the level of the individual stones, the level of the groups of stones and the level of the whole board. You have to carefully build safe territory while trying to stop your opponent building his. As well as this you have to protect your pieces from potentially game-changing captures.

My interest in Go came when I heard that it is much much harder for a computer than chess is. Chess programs regularly beat the worlds top human players, but Go-bots struggle against even intermediate level amateurs. One of the reasons is, of course, that a lot more work has been put into Chess programs, but this is not the whole story. Go is a lot more complex because the number of legal moves is astronomical. Orders of magnitude higher than the number of moves available in chess. Consider the opening move of each game. In chess white moves first and can theoretically move any one of her 8 pawns or either of her knights. That's a total of 10 possible moves. In Go, black starts and can place a stone anywhere on the 19x19 grid. That's 361 possible moves! This is somewhat unrepresentative, because the number of chess moves allowed increases during the game, while the number of Go moves tends to decrease (barring captures...). Even so, a chess player is dealing with 64 squares compared with 361 crossings in Go, and the move in chess are more restrictive than in Go. When I was younger I often got beaten at chess by the computer program on our PC. Learning that Go has yet to succumb to the mighty computer I decided it would be fun to learn. I recently won my first game against a popular "Go-bot", GnuGo. I was playing on a smaller "training" board which is much smaller; 9x9.

Go equipment is available from many places online. www.gofigure.de is an excellent site for European customers and their overseas shipping rates are reasonable (although the Dollar's current weakness against the Euro might put some people off for the time being...)

There are many ways to play on your computer either against a "bot" or against human opposition. Yahoo games offers Go, although I don't believe the standard is particularly high. A better option is CGoban which is a program which allows you to connect with someone else you know, or play against a variety of bots. A good bot to try is the aforementioned GnuGo.

Go is a brilliant game; easy to pick up, hard to master. It can be played with just a grid on a plastic sheet and some pennies, but playing on a nice heavy board or table with good solid stones is the most satisfying thing in the world.

Learn more about this author, Eric Blair.
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