Hello

I wonder, do many go players also often play other board games, like reversi for example, or would playing another black and white stones game interfere with the intuition for the game of go?

best,

Thomas

I play and have played all sorts of abstract games, among them Chess, Shogi, Xiangqi, Reversi, Draughts, Checkers, Gomoku, Pente, Connect Four, Oware, Dots & Boxes and all sorts of minor recently invented strategy games.

If anything, playing go gives you an advantage in that you are already used to reading ahead and thinking strategically.

On the other hand, none of them have ever measured up to go in terms of game depth and so they never rise above the level of occasional distraction to me.

I enjoy chess puzzles quite a bit. I only rarely play though against something other than my iPad. Mostly I play turn based strategy games of various kinds on the PC though.

Every couple of years I play a game of Othello, Gomoku & Co. (and I tried your game btw, very nice!). I enjoy a little bit the tactics and getting lost in calculating the position, but not much more.

The strategic depth, that every game is different, and that I can still learn new things no matter what my level is what keeps me playing Go.

Shogi which I'm starting to love as much as go and occasionally chess which is also great.

I've tried others but so far I haven't found any that seems as interesting as those three. Xiangqi maybe? To me, it seems too much of a fast paced tactics based game but maybe my impression just comes from the fact I don't know the strategy. It's been a long time since I tried it anyway, maybe when I give it another chance I'll like it more.

Currently, I play Havannah and Slither. Both are good, but neither has quite matched go for me. It's possible Slither is the better of the two, but I just can't wrap my head around it well enough to get past the initial opacity. I liked Arimaa for a while, but haven't played for some time. Ayu is also worth a try.

Redstone, Oust and Cephalopod are all quite intriguing, but I don't play because of the inconvenience of it.

I've tried to play each of Dots and Boxes, Chess, and Reversi in the past, but never really enjoyed them--they always felt like work.

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Interesting to see HermanHiddema and Matthiasa mention the depth of go compared to other games as one of the elements that make it a better game. I see your point but yet im puzzled by what is exactly meant by depth? In principle these pure abstracts like checkers and reversi all have sufficient complexity to be as ´unsolvable´ as go to us (and you can always scale up the board size). Or do you perhaps by depth mean the amount of heuristics the game allows to evaluate a certain position on the board? (So that it is not ´depth´ in a tree-search sense) and that this is (to the human eye) richer in the game of go compared to many other games?

@matthiasa so you´ve tried Symmetry? cool!

Checkers is actually solvable by computers, and I know that Draughts is basically dead as a competitive game (whether players accept that or not) because it is so prone to draws at high levels.

Chess is, mathematically speaking, less deep than Go, and it's also slightly less deep in the number of gradations of skill between a beginner and a world champion.* I'm not sure either of those points really matter though. I personally just don't find that chess fits with my aesthetics--I always feel as if I run out of moves that matter.

* The point about levels of skill has been disputed here on the boards, but I still find it clearly true.

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I think finding grounds for comparison and the working out of such would be rather difficult given how different the games are.

How much go have you played? It might be easier to understand why go players think it's deeper than dots and boxes if you went spelunking.


It's actually not super-difficult. As I understand it, there are about 4000 points of difference in the EGF between a raw beginner and a 9d pro (-1000 to 2900), whereas in chess there are about 2500 points of difference between a raw beginner and Magnus Carlsen (300 to 2862). By the way, has anyone else noticed that Carlsen is the spitting image of Lee Changho?

Anyway, assuming Elo works the same way for the EGF and the chess world, that's a pretty solid grounds for comparison.

They're not the same, you're expected win rate against someone 100 points stronger than you in chess in FIDE's system is not the same as someone 100 points stronger than you under the EGF system for instance. You're expected to win more in the FIDE system (35% vs 29% approx).

And this is before you try and deal with the issue that normally all high dan games are even and all kyu games are not in EGF tournaments. So we've points ratings based solely on even games for the better players and handicap performance much of the time for weaker players. There are rather large issues with this from a prediction point of view, if A can give B 2 stones and B can give C 4 stones, must A be able to give 6 stones to C?

Well again, granting you that that's true, we're not talking super diff. Converting 4000 pts at 29% per cent into 35% wouldn't be too hard and I would do it right now except that I'm right smack in between cocktails and dinner.

Sure, but since I've never seen anyone, including people playing a couple of weeks, having a GoR under 100 I'm curious where you got -1000 from unless you're talking someone on their first evening playing go.

Actually, 100 EGF is 20 kyu. AGA ranks go past 30 kyu. The systems aren't perfectly calibrated, but they're close enough that it's clear that there's a range of 20 kyus that the EGF lumps together in a single category of "players with rating 100".

An AGA 30 kyu is roughly an EGF -1000.

You can quibble about the exact numbers, but it does seem that Go has slightly more range.

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For me a game of Go is like a story which unfolds. In the beginning you plant your seeds, groups grow organically and the fights in the different areas of the board influence each other and grow together in the end. It has more to do with seeing the game from above and really seeing organic groups pushing each other around, rather than just calculating nitty-gritty tactical positions. I really recommend playing a little bit on KGS and maybe reaching +-15 Kyu and you'll see what I mean!



Yip, good one!

Sure. Where I think it makes sense is that I don't think player strength is anywhere stable enough to talk about GoR ratings under 100, or even around 100 really. Talking about ranks under 20k is usually fairly pointless. I mean, if I grabbed an AGA 22k and a 25k would you be happy betting money on the 22k winning a 2 stone game? How about a 5 dan and a 2 dan?

Yeah, but the same is true of chess ratings under 1000.

Exactly. This is why I think it's pretty pointless to go Higher Bound - Lower Bound = Skill Gap.

Just because you can't identify a clear lower bound for either of them, doesn't mean you can't be fairly sure that there's a difference in overall bound difference or magnitude.

Not that this measure necessarily means very much, but I think chess and go probably really are quantifiably different under it, with go having a few more levels - I've thought about it before (with some of the same objections), and I think Go can be reasonably said to have at least a small number more of these statistical grading levels, though the original example (2900 -> -1000?) seems to make rather too much of the poorly defined beginner levels that may not fit well in the model.

I'll stress that I'm not saying that this makes Go harder than chess in any useful sense. Even if we wanted to apply it to real life, another vital number for judging difficulty levels is how quickly people tend to move between them. It doesn't matter how many of these levels statistically exist if Go players tend to move up them much more easily, for instance.

Edit: Oh, and another interesting observation is that chess ais have pushed the grading system up by (I think) a few hundred points! Depending on what you make of that, it would rather close the gap with Go, though of course we don't know how many stones go bots will be giving top professionals in 20 years

I think the issue is (as you mention), say there are X grades of winning level in a game (each rank is 60% apart of whatever) and X-1 grades in a different game. If it takes much longer to gain a grade in the latter game (i.e. more effort, knowledge, training required etc) do we consider there to be more or less of a skill gap between beginner and supreme expert in it over the other? Is skill gap measured by winning percentages or by the amount of effort required to become an elite player? I'm not convinced a bigger "ELO space" tells us much useful information about how hard a game is to master at all.