My name is Andrew and I've recently developed an interest in Go.

I played a lot of Chess many years ago, and since then haven't had much of an interest in combinatorial abstracts; they seemed too serious, competitive, and dominated by looking many moves ahead. The latter point seemed reinforced by the success of Chess AIs that brute-force searched the game space, something I don't consider particularly praiseworthy. Go caught my attention when I heard the best Go AIs were easily dispatched by middling players, suggesting the game contained a depth beyond n-ply lookaheads - a depth more friendly to human ways of thought.

After downloading a Go program onto my phone, being thrashed repeatedly then visibly improving after reading strategy articles (and avoiding tactical fights), I've become intrigued by the game. I'm a beginner, and have just looked at basic articles on general strategy and tactics; I've avoided learning particular joseki, fuseki, or other patterns.

Go has the reputation of being the deepest, yet also the simplest 2-player combinatorial abstract in existence - despite its humble appearance, able to accommodate vastly different styles and bring out the personalities of the players - and I look forward to exploring it.

Great to have you on board, and welcome to a great game that most of us here love

Welcome - you've found THE game.



That's what they say. However, is this really true? Personally, I doubt it - maybe a topic for a separate thread ...

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Stay out of my territory! (W. White, aka Heisenberg)

Welcome to the forum.

I too am a former chess player, and I gave it up because of the role that rote memory and calculation was taking. As you infer, go is a much more human-oriented game. But that does not mean that you can ignore joseki. To attempt to do so will frequently put you at a severe disadvantage in the middle game, and much of the beauty of the game will remain inaccessible to you.

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Help make L19 more organized. Make an index: https://lifein19x19.com/viewtopic.php?f=14&t=5207

Thanks to all!



Oh well, I have my fingers crossed.



Thanks, I do realise there is much to learn.

Hi Andrew,

I have basically the same "career" as you. Having played chess some 20 years ago I tried to create a chess engine, without much success. I got discouraged (at playing and programming) as the programs became so good at playing chess that even freeware engines play on grandmaster level. So I discovered go and decided to learn the game two and a half years ago. With the experience of this time I just can congratulate you that you have found this fantastic oriental game of go. Unfortunately in the western hemisphere it is a bit difficult to find people to play go with IRL (depends on where you live of course) since the game is not very popular (yet) here. We're in a globalized world, so it is easy to finde someone to play with online, but playing face to face with a real board and stones is so much better. If you have the opportunity to have one of the annual tournaments nearby, don't miss it.

And welcome to the forums of course

Howdy, and welcome! If you have questions or want help, feel free to ask or post a game for review!

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Someday I want to be strong enough to earn KGS[-].

I played Chess for quite a while, I still play it once in a while too. I don't mind rote memorization and reading things ahead, but that's really 90% of Chess, while Go has much more positional judgment, room for flexibility, individuality, and there's always that sense that, no matter how good you are, you really don't quite fully understand Go.

A bit of advice from me(and I know I differ very heavily with Joaz on this point): Strategy in the first year of learning should be very minimal for long term growth. Concentrating on axioms to help you get a feel for the game isn't as important as learning basic tactics. Same with sequence memorization, for that matter.

The fundamentals are rooted in basic tactics, so the more you can familiarize yourself with them, the better, I feel. Otherwise it's very easy to get blown out in a game.

Other than that, I hope you enjoy Go, even though it has many similar aspects to Chess like rote memorization and tactical reading, the ascetic aspect of the game allows people to not only be creative, but to be more skilled than artificial intelligence.

Beware, go has a somewhat undeserved reputation for being more mystical, "human", intuition-based, than it really is. 99% of it is still memorization and sequence calculation. A player with superior experience (aided by memorization) and superior calculation is unlikely to lose.

It's no longer true that computers can be beaten by "any middling player". 1 dan is a fairly competent level - most players never reach it. Computers are stronger than 1 dan. And they got to that level by, essentially, brute-force searching.

While it's true that go allows for some individuality and style, this is often exaggerated as well. Go probably doesn't allow for any more individuality than chess. There are not many top players with recognizable styles. There were attempts on this forum to guess professional players based on their games. The results were not very convincing. For weaker than top players, their "style" is usually just a collection of mistakes they have to correct if they want to get stronger (e.g. TheCaptain).

Many young children (10-12 years old) are near-professional level Go players. I can easily believe in a young child being very good at calculation. I find it much harder to believe in a young child having extremely proficient "deep, human, personal" abilities. For example, performing classical music clearly requires deep, human, personal abilities, and not just calculation - and there aren't very many young children who are professional-level classical musicians. (There are young children who have good technique - but that's not enough.)

Don't get me wrong, I love go, but much of the mysticism surrounding it is unjustified.

One of my friends consistently correctly guesses the accounts of top amateur and pro players just dependent on their playstyle.

Andy Liu, Juyong Koh, Calvin Sun, Peter Liu, Lee Changho, to name a few.

He'll tell me about it while we watch the game online, and later on, it'll be confirmed by a third party, or that person.

People have styles. It just takes some practice to be able to tell which is which.

I just don't think there are enough possible moves in a Chess game to allow for that kind of individuality.

If you read professional commentary on games, they often say, "This move is black's style," or "Only 'player' would play this kind of move," And while many sequences are forced, there are certain junctions in a game when the choices are so numerous that individuality is indeed possible.

Of course reading and memorization are necessary, but the point is that intuition has its place in Go, and it's a very significant place.

Who said anything about deep, personal, human abilties? It is more about spatial intuition, which comes from pattern recognition. It is something which is developed as you get more experienced at the game, and something that not easy to emulate in artificial intelligence. It is that part of the game that allows you to be creative.

You should instead test whether or not professionals can recognize other professional styles by simply looking at their games. I'm sure the success rate would be much higher.

Of course go players have individual styles, people will have individual styles in any activity. I'm just not sure that go allows more room for style than chess. The number of possible moves is a weak arguments here - the number of possible good moves in go is not directly related to the number of all possible moves.

It is certainly said often that top chess players have individual styles. Maybe there's someone out there who can tell them apart, I don't know. But ihe comments about playing style in the chess community seem as common as in the go community.

And "pattern recognition" implies memorization.

Pattern recognition is quite a separate phenomenon than memorization in the brain.

Take something like the Ear Reddening move.

That's obviously not memorization, and you can't really call it calculation either. It is based in intuition and feeling, but also backed up by high level tactics, but you could not have gotten that move through tactics alone.

You can't really have a move like that in Chess, at least, as far as I can tell.

Longer games mean more decisions to make, and the number of moves of comparable quality are quite many. You can watch pros broadcasting title games, and they'll do 5-6 possible variations, and a completely different one will show up in game. Watching chess commentary, usually after the opening, the commentator shows us 2-3 possible lines in deep detail, which usually contains the move that will be played. It feels more like the commentator is explaining the game to us as it progresses, whereas the professional in Go is also to a degree speculating on what could possible happen in the game.



Also, Pala, I just noticed that you live remarkably close to me. I'm the dude at 12 and Cambie on IgoLocal.

Cool, did you just move to Vancouver? Come to the Nikkei Place club sometime. There's not much of a go scene here sadly.

And ahem, I know almost nothing about chess so maybe you're right, but from what little I've seen (a few commented games) chess players spend as much effort praising the top players' style and intuition as we do, so there must be something to it

There's a club that meets regularly after 5 on weekdays or on weekends?

I haven't found one around here yet.

Thanks to all for the welcome and advice.



My reference to "strategy over tactics" was about my I tangible improvement against the AI when I took to playing conservatively (avoiding getting blown out), forwent attacking (badly) and instead performed tenuki into uncontested space. Having learned a little since then, I'm able to defend more efficiently and attack more effectively, and win some of these tactical fights. It feels great killing a big group, especially when a few months back I considered the AI immune to losing stones! I suspect that what is considered strategy by veterans is completely incomprehensible to me for now.

Since trying to study the game, I've found learning the basic types of connections, haengma, tactics, shapes, and opening principles most useful. I stayed away from the rote sequences because I didn't understand what was going on, but I think I'm getting close. I recently read up on countering the 3-3 invasion of 4-4 and applied the sequence successfully; the discussion also made me see new general possibilities (giving up side territory in return for influence).



Alas, the romantic image of human intellect falls before massively parallel Monte Carlo methods. Well, I guess there's always Arimaa...

Jokes aside, the techniques used in modern Go AIs (randomly playing out countless games after every move) indicate that it's a deep strategic game full of non-obvious and indirect moves - which is enough for my purposes, as it's highly unlikely that I'll become a professional 9-dan.



I'm happy to compete on fuzzy pattern recognition, positional analysis, and heuristics, rather than on rote openings and lookahead. The fact that it requires trillions of operations per second for an AI to be competitive is quite a marvel.