One thing I like about go is that even a beginner like me can follow an expert game. Although I’m many orders of magnitude from being able to generate it, I can appreciate (“verify”) the quality of play in http://senseis.xmp.net/?FamousGoGames . I’m not sure that’s as true of something like chess or Scrabble, which seem to get abstruse and memorization-based at high levels.
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.
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.