People alwasy talk about how simple the rules of go are. It comes up in conversations about the beauty of the game and in comparisons with chess and when talking about computer go programs etc...

And true, the rules written out are simple enough.

But I've never met a beginner who could quickly wrap their mind around the idea of life and death. The statement of the rule is simple enough (when a group has no liberties it is removed from the board), but it seems conceptually more complex.

(for myself i learned the game as a kid and when i relearned many years later L&D was the only part i remembered so I don't recall this stage of learning at all)

My question is: Is it somewhat disingenuous to say that the rules of Go are simple when people have so much trouble conceptualizing their implications in simple L&D situations?

In chess you can just explain what each piece does and the idea of checkmate and people seem quite comfortable.

Would it be more accurate to explain the rules as kind of tricky, but they become natural with a little experience. Being up front with the fact that their first couple of games will be the Go equivalent of gibberish.

Of course the phrase "the rules are simple" can mean several different things. I've never taken it to mean that go is a simple game. I think it is fair to say that the rules are simple, but the implications of those rules can be difficult to grasp, and the strategy is virtually infinitely complex.

Sure they're comfortable with it. Chess is practically everywhere in western culture. They've probably already picked up a bit of it just by watching shows and movies. But when teaching an absolute beginner, they'll frequently forget which piece can move where and how they capture. They won't understand sacrifice and positioning, exactly the same as they won't understand the more advanced concepts in Go. But in Go, they probably won't be asking "wait, where can I put this piece, again?" (Until the trickier situations: Ko, snapback, shortage of liberties...)

Yes.

In the context of explaining the rules to a beginner or a spectator who is just curious who doesn't play they really are simple. All the complicated stuff about multiple kos, strange sekis, cyclical positions, and disputes that arise after alternating play has ended can be completely omitted from the discussion. If you wish to you could say there are some technically complicated issues that almost never occur in ordinary play so you are not going to discuss them. When I teach beginners or onlookers I never mention seki and blithely treat ko as a prohibition on repeating the position if I mention ko at all. If beginners encounter something like "sending two and receiving one", which might well occur in a beginners game, and the players are confused about the situation that is the time for a more sophisticated discussion.

So I don't think it is disingenuous to say that the rules are fundamentally simple. The vast majority of amateur go players get along just fine without ever thinking about the subtle complications of the rules. And if you use NZ rules then they really are simple, it's the ramifications of the rules that are complicated.

A chess piece does what it does, and nothing else ( except for promotion, which is simply a one-time transformation. )
Go stones on the other hand don't 'do' anything. They just sit there. But things happen. ( Very zen, isn't it? )

I think that the relevant concept is emergent behavior. I had read people like Stuart Kauffman and John Conway before I encountered go, so I already had the intellectual pigeonhole; and thus it made sense. It might have been very confusing otherwise.

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Gowan: the original poster was making a point that need not have anything to do with seki or ko. Plain old vanilla life and death is not so simple. Can a beginner see that a bulky four is dead? That type of issue isn't even really tsumego--it's also necessary to determine the score (though you can argue we should teach beginners area scoring for that reason).

I agree with the original poster that there's a mismatch between the simplicity with which you can state the rules and what it takes to actually apply them in a game. That's just applying the rules, mind you, not finding a good strategy for play.

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Not at all. The rules and their implications are two entirely different things.
The rules are very simple indeed, which is part of the beauty of Go.
And their implications are mind boggling indeed, which is also part of the beauty of Go.

For what it's worth, I don't usually explain life & death to beginners at first. I try to play several small board games in a row (for a while I printed a 7x7 on a sheet of paper for this purpose), with high handicap. When black has a handicap on a small board, they don't need to understand eyes to live, and I'm in no hurry to explain how to kill . Eventually it comes up naturally. I usually teach area scoring or AGA rules, so I can physically capture opponent's dead stones. I don't need to say "trust me, these guys are dead, let me take them off the board", which frustrates beginners I think.

I never had a problem with the concept of life and death, aside from maybe not recognizing false eyes at first. It would perhaps be helpful if the author of the thread would add a poll so we could measure the amount of difficulty people have on average.

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I agree with the original poster. The rules of go are difficult to understand. What is territory? What groups are alive and not? That is difficult to understand. I had problems with it when I was new to it and I tryed to teach my parents reasently and they had big problems.

I was 6 or 7 when I learned chess and I had no preconseptions about what chess would be like and I understood it imidiatly.

I never say that the go-rules are easy.

I feel EdLee captured the issue very elegantly (honorable mention; everyone else who said something similar).

So clearly I have nothing of value to add.

But I can't resist: Precisely how simple the rules are depends.

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There are simple rules,

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/simple.html
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/simpcom.html

almost simple rules,

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/%7Ewjh/go/rules/AGA.html

difficult rules,

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wjh/go/rules/Japanese.html
http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/j1989c.html

and simplifications of difficult rules

http://home.snafu.de/jasiek/sj.html


- Simple rules do not have life and death,
- almost simple rules mention life and death but would be simpler without mentioning it,
- difficult rules rely on life and death without its solution in the one continued game sequence,
- and simplifications of difficult rules rely on life and death with its solution in the one continued game sequence.


Hence Go rules are as simple or difficult as you choose! My advice for teaching beginners is: Choose simple rules! Explain strategy about connection or life and death only later! Explain strategy as strategy and not as rules!

A number of other posters have already basically said it, but I think what it comes down to is this:

Playing a legal game of go is really quite easy. You take turns, you play on intersections (one stone per intersection), once played stones don't move unless they are captured. Once you get past that, there are a couple places that occasionally you can't play (ko, and under many rulesets, moves that involve self-capture). That's it, that's what it takes to play a game of go. In chess it is much, much easier to make an illegal move (for any given piece, the majority of the board cannot be moved to on at any particular time). I guess another way you could look at it -- If you were to write a computer program that made random plays in go (i.e. strictly followed the rules, but ignored their implication and strategy) which would be easier, go or chess? For go you could pick a random point on the board, check for 2 or 3 conditions (is there a stone there? is it under ko ban? would this lead to self capture?) and then play. For chess you would have to pick a piece, then determine what legal moves the piece has, then pick a move (I guess you could alternatively pick a place, see if there are any pieces that could legally move there, and then pick one of those, etc).


Now the other stuff, life and death, rule implications, etc.....those are what it takes to not just play go, but to play go well...I don't think you'll find too many people disagreeing with you when you say it is quite difficult to play go well (=.

The basic rules are pretty straightforward: Players take turns playing stones on intersections. Adjacent stones of the same color form groups. Groups must have empty intersections adjacent to them to remain on the board. Board positions can't be repeated.

There may be some details that rules geeks like to stress over, but I think that it's easy to get someone playing go.

The details of life and death, influence, and all of that stuff is just strategy.

Edit: Plus one to Mef's post. I think I'm basically trying to say the same as what he is.

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I see two conceptual mistakes here.

1) People forget that life and death evaluation is part of the rules of Go as it is actually played--you need it to score the game. Although you can write down simple rules that avoid life and death, beginners aren't taught those rules. Even most players using area scoring don't actually play out life and death to the point where they remove all bothersome stones--they just see live groups.

Scoring and the end of the game is important. Mef is right about gameplay, but that still leaves something out.

I think Jasiek is closest here: Go can have simple rules. As a game that is commonly played, it does not (I hope that statement is acceptable to you, Robert).

2) people are acting as if our goal is to evaluate the complexity of the linguistic statement of the rules, according some notion analogous to computational complexity. This is not the right question. The question was about what it takes for a beginner to understand the rules. Not even for a beginner to understand strategy. Just to be able to understand the rules, one proxy of which would be scoring a completed game. (I'm not 100% sure that's exactly what the original poster meant, but it seems like the best way to ask the question).

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This is correct for
- Nihon Kiin Rules
- WAGC Rules
- Verbal Japanese Rules
- Most Japanese style go server rules
- Korean Rules

It is wrong for
- simple area scoring rulesets (actually used by some!)
- Simplified Ing Rules (as used by the EGF)
- New Zealand Rules

It is partially right / wrong for (because life and death is mentioned but superfluous in the rules)
- Ing Rules
- Chinese Rules
- AGA Rules
- AGA style rules



Wrong. - It is correct that some teachers do and some other teachers do not use such rules.



This does not imply though that the rules would be needing any life and death. See, e.g., the Simplified Ing Rules, which provide the optional agreement phase without any reference to life and death.



This statement - yes.

I just wrote that I do teach beginners in exactly that way

For what it's worth, after a game or 2 I may say something like: "this stone of mine in your territory will die no matter what, you can just take it off now, those extra moves won't matter", which I think most players find fairly intuitive.

edit: I do agree that most players know and teach japanese rules which are more complicated and less elegent. This is something we can all work to change

This is what I'm getting at. Simple yes. But when we say simple to people about to learn the game they take it to mean that they should be easy to understand and apply. Many beginners get turned off to the game when they don't quickly grasp what is going on on the board after they've been told the rules are simple. (in the original post I mention L&D but I could also have included "what is territory?" people often have trouble grasping the object of the game)

My point is that go players should be more up front with the fact that the game is kind of tricky to get the hang of even before elementary strategy comes into the discussion.

Emeraldemon: I've been experimenting with several ways to introduce newbies and I like the method you described earlier. I'll give it a shot next time i kind find someone willing to sit down to learn.

Knowing you've reached the end of the game is the trickiest part for beginners. This is where Chess and similar games are much simpler. I've seen many players just continue to play moves inside their own territory because they didn't know it hurt them or that they could do anything else.

I think when you talk about rules, other games are much simpler. There are just more moves that you need to remember for games like chess, but people just keep the list next to them.