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My officemate in grad school, Jon Ryder, introduced me to the game of Go. Every day after lunch I'd ask to play a game. And every day he'd reply, "Not today. Well maybe one game." And every day he'd give me a full nine stone handicap and whup me soundly. Only after a full year did I finally win a game. Now I like to think that no one can give me nine stones and beat me; but its unlikely to be true.
Here's a personal go problem. Black to play and live.
Roll the mouse over the image to see the solution.
Languages differ in how they refer to the game of go.
| Japanese |
Go |
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| Chinese |
Wei-qi |
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"weh chee" |
| Korean |
Baduk |
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"bah dook" |
| English |
Go |
also igo, goe |
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AGA
The American Go Association (usgo.org)
promotes go in the United States, organizes activities,
and fosters communication. There is an annual meeting/tournament called the
"US Go Congress".
HOST a Tournament
A tournament can be a great way to add some variety to a go club's life.
It does not need to be a huge effort to hold a small one; see
The Instant Tournament Primer.
PRINT
In the olden days recording a game was a paper-and-pencil affair.
Most of the paper diagrams available record games had lines intersecting
were the stone number was to be written. For clearer records I developed a
format with gray around the spaces to write the stone numbers:
gamerecord.pdf to print the page
gamerecord.ps (revise and print with
Ghostscript)
One can code go diagrams directly in PostScript using a
small PostScript library.
Example at the right.
RATINGS
Paul Matthews of New Jersey developed the first program to compute
go ratings. To share the concepts, he let me translate it into
pseudo-code and distribute that.
Many online servers have ratings based on the code.
Matthews original code has neen superseded with a tool for
running tournaments.
It is described in
technical prose and
statistical analysis.
RULES
Although mostly simple the rules of go have a few murky corners. So there are several sets of rules.
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