These were the group at college with the collective smell playing Magic: The Gathering. I suppose mild autism, or what used to be called Aspergers. Never disliked them, but they were certainly different. I’m likely somewhere on the spectrum, and not just because “it’s a spectrum”, but it didn’t quite manifest like that for me.
You know, I always associated dirty, smelly degenerates with magic until I started playing - (I validated that by being the dirty smelly degenerate 😉) it was interesting finding out that potentially due to the high cost of the decks, a good part of the playerbase actually really had their shit together. We’re talking engineers, pediatricians, lawyers etc. who could afford to throw $500 down on cardboard. Enough folks were married that my wife started calling the place “husband daycare”
Of course the smelly smell still made an appearance, I was able to determine if a particular person was in the local game store (LGS) by smell alone, the moment I walked into the store.
Newbies are often afraid or insulted to use “handicap” pieces, but the few free pieces given to a lower-rank player are actually quite effective at adjusting the balance with unevenly ranked players. It’s not a huge advantage and doesn’t fundamentally change the play of the game.
Using different sizes of board is also neat. I’m very fond of a short game using only a 9x9 board. Plays a lot faster, but trades strategy for a more tactical game.
Newbies are often afraid or insulted to use “handicap” pieces
I made this mistake! I started learning Go years and years ago, and it turned out the company where I was working at that time had a former 7-dan amateur player. When he found out I was learning he offered to play me, which I eagerly accepted. I didn’t know this at the time, but 7-dan amatuer is the highest Go ranking one can achieve in Japan without playing professionally (there are separate 1-dan through 9-dan ranks for pros). For our first game, he offered to give me the full 9-stone handicap since I was just starting out. I thought that sounded excessive and suggested a 6-stone handicap instead, so that’s what we did. He fucking destroyed me that game. It was not even remotely close. For the rematch, I humbly accepted the full 9-stone handicap.
No offense, but the extra stones just made it so he could go easy on you. When I started go, the new player challenge was to end a 9 stone handicap game against the resident 3-dan with a “positive” score. [0]
[0] most official scoring methods either ignore captured stones, or count them as positive points for the player who captured them. However, when scoring by hand, it is easier to count them as negative points for the person who lost them; so thats what we did.
I personally don’t like the experience of playing with more than 3-4 handicap stones. For the weaker player, every move it’s like “What is my opponent up to now? I am still ahead, I should just play safe.” and for the stronger player it’s like “How can I force my opponent to make mistakes?”. These thoughts are sometimes part of an even game but not as frequently.
I wanted to learn how to play after watching a few dozen episodes of Hikaru no Go, but it’s such an obtuse game. Chess I can understand, but Go has a level of strategy that my mind just can’t grasp.
That’s the great thing tho, the rules are very simple, anyone can pick up how to play. Then the strategy has so many layers that people can devote a lifetime of study to it, and it can become quite a psychological battle of wills between the two players in a way. But you can enjoy it right from the beginning without all that. And the handicap system means a game between players of very different skill can still be fun. Man I need to get back into playing go!
It wasn’t until 2015 that the top Go player lost to an Ai while chess lost in 1997. It’s wild how big that gap is when you think about how much tech had to improve to make it possible.
It’s a bit complicated to understand what an “algorithm” is in case of a neural network. Besides, I haven’t heard of recent human wins over an AI in Go, can you point me to read about it?
This is actually more impressive about AI. People used to think Go AI wouldn’t be able to beat a human player until like 2050. I certainly thought that when I learned it in like 2010. Back then the strongest AI was like 1 Dan (amateur) at most. (9 Dan is the highest rank and professional 9 Dan which you need to play professional games to get to are much stronger than an amateur 9 Dan which is like 9 Dan from an online website. Also the games rankings go from 30 kyu which is the lowest rank to 1 kyu which is the highest “amateur ranking”. After 1 kyu is the Dan ranks ranging from 1 to 9)
It’s called Igo and it was invented in Korea. It has less unique pieces than compared to chess, yet is more complex than chess by a higher order of magnitude.
The claim that it was invented in China is actually from baseless speculation from a flawed study published back in 1993 from a Chinese university tied to a government propaganda campaign and regurgitated in an essay posted in 2004 that someone cited on Wikipedia in 2014.
The British Go association is citing gobase.org which is registered in the Netherlands, who is citing a historian named H.J.R. Murray. who said he read a 1983 Watanabe Hideo book where that guy says he saw a picture of a Go board excavated in China back in 1954, that is not possible to correctly carbon date since there was no reports of that excavation having any evidence of organic material collected to properly carbon date and no one has any photographs nor records to inspect of the actual excavation.
You are literally relying on a Chinese university tied to the Chinese government telling you “trust me bro we invented this” without providing the public any factual info to investigate.
I’m literally going through all the citations that are available in Wikipedia and the links OP is posting. You want me to post that shit in a redundant unecessary way? Because that’s actually what I’m doing.
I don’t know what you were trying to prove here, but not a single one of the links mentions Korea as the birth place, if they worked at all. As you go further down the list, they either don’t work or have access to the content. For the ones that do work, they all start with a variation of the following:
Go is one of the oldest board games in the world. Its true origins are unknown, though it almost certainly originated in China some 3,000-4,000 years ago. In the absence of facts about the origin of the game there are various myths: for example that the legendary Emperor Yao invented Go to enlighten his son, Dan Zhu.
No, I want you to provide a source that says Go was invented in Korea. I also checked Wikipedia, and several other sites about Go, because you made me curious, since I had always heard it was invented in China.
Everything I’ve seen has said it was invented in China.
Looks like I misread a John Fairburn book where he says Wei’Qi was invented 1000 years ago and the Chinese lied that they invented it 4000 years ago. Even those claims come from dubious archeological excavations done in China.
I’m going to dig deeper, but I remember reading somewhere there’s evidence of it actually being invented in India long before it was popular in China, based on the game called Navakankari/Daadi made of small wooden pieces that are less likely to survive archeological records.
Yes please! This was the obstacle that kept me from trying it a couple of weeks ago. Ideally I’d love to find the equivalent to chess.com (or lichess), but for Go.
Just go to online-go.com in your preferred browser. It works great on mobile. There’s a large collection of puzzles to do. Those are user submitted, which means the quality varies, but some people have put together some pretty good sets that work as tutorials for beginners.
OGS is the most popular server outside of Asia, and has a nice social side with chat rooms and… clubs? I don’t remember their name for it, but you can join groups for finding teaching games, groups for people in your geographic region, etc.
I don’t log on often these days, but I love teaching new players. Feel free to add me as a friend there (and maybe dm me here so I know to look). My name there is nomadfarmer.
I used to use gobandroid off f-droid, but these days I use crazystone: I like its ai for casual play (and I usually only play casual!). It does seem to have a deep love for talking home with no explanation when it starts up though, so on Lineage I just disable its internet permission.
Online-go is good but I haven’t really gotten into playing against strangers on the internet: I feel I should take it more seriously when I’m against a real person!
Wish I had people offline to play with sometimes though.
Gosh. Chess breaks my brain enough. I think I tried to tangle with Go for a bit after watching a doc about it but it was just too much for my feeble brain.
I’ve been following a series of tutorials by Go Magic. They have a YouTube channel! The videos are extremely well produced and explain things super well!
That was the advice given to me from my teacher so just passing it along :) I think it means all the options can be overwhelming, so don’t overthink it and just play without hope of winning. You’ll soon get a feel for what good moves are.
He also lent me a book that helped, so consider doing some reading. I wish I remembered the book’s name. There is also this site: senseis.xmp.net
Y’all should also play against other opponents/AI. Intermediate level opponents will help you to grow.
Oooooh I’m so jealous, I cannot convince my man to play with me. It’s nice to learn with someone at the same level as you.
Edit: The adage I was told was “To learn go, lose your first hundred games” with the modern addition of “quickly”. For what it’s worth, I lost my first 57 games on OGS. It is a good way to learn.
There is an incredible book called The Master of Go by Yasunari Kawabata, a Nobel-winning Japanese author. It’s based on the true story of a master-level Go game that took six months.
I know that doesn’t sound very interesting, but trust me. It really is.
I used to play a lot in college. KGS was very popular and fun to hang around. Hikaru no Go anime is really good. Also there is a documentary about Lee Sedol vs Alphago games. Check them out. It’s best to play in person so check out local clubs and tournaments. r/baduk subreddit is fairly active.
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