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    Standard Member Hugh
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    The ancient game of Go is extremely complex. To this day, computers have fallen short of their usual run at defeating the best humans. Here is a nice recent article:

    http://www.wired.com/2014/05/the-world-of-computer-go

    Our very own M57 made a Go-themed board:

    http://www.wargear.net/boards/view/Go-Geared

    It's fun, though it is not that much like Go. I suspect computers could do quite well at the deterministic version. He thought so too, so he made a diced version, which is pretty fun.

    On this site, the game that is closest to Go in complexity, in my opinion, is the 19x19 version of Hex. It has been shown that the problem of determining strategies for an nxn Hex board is computationally intractable. So while there are published solutions for the 9x9 game, it will be a long time before we see the 10x10 or the 11x11 fall.

    http://www.wargear.net/boards/view/Hex

    I won't be joining Hex games for a few months, so you're all safe from getting absolutely humiliated ;)


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    Colonel M57 M57 is offline now
    Standard Member M57
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    @Hugh,

    Your post inspired me to do some more research into Go, a game I know embarrassingly little about considering I designed a board inspired by the game.

    I've only recently discovered that the corners and edges of a Go board have natural "defenses" already in place, and this is the reason that opening play generally starts nearer to the corners. This got me to wandering if there might be a mod I could make to Go-Geared that somehow gave players less incentive to control the center, and in this way make the game a bit more Go-like.

    One way that came to mind would be to make edge-squares 'count' towards capture of the first lines of interior squares.  Using this rule, squares b2 through b7 on a 9x9 board could be captured with only two stones. 

    For example, stones on b4 and b6 would capture b5 because a5 is an implied holding. Similarly stones on (c5 and b4) or (c5 and b6) would also capture b5.  Edge squares would be captured as per usual.

    This rule change would significantly increase the capturing value of squares c3, c7, g3 and g8. the equivalent of a 3-3 point on a Go board. It would also moderately increase the value of all squares up to 3 from any edges.

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    Edited Fri 16th May 14:21 [history]

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