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FOSS GNUGo to play against a computer.

IGS Pandanet provides a good GUI client for GNUGo as well as a client to pandanet if you want to play real people.

KGS is an alternative to pandanet but is more IRCish and the client can't do computer play.

Ignore the noise of geeks falling over themselves and expostulating into thin air with gestures, but instead consider the following excellent introduction to the world's best game at IGS-Pandanet: http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/learning_go/learning_go_1.html

My favorite game.

First time I played online I had my ass handed to me by a precocious 12 year old. Ah well, the memories.

*Alot* more complex and tactical then Chess, believe it.

See the rules at: http://www.britgo.org/intro/booklet.pdf

Play online here: http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/

I recommend installing glGo and having a go vs. computer (on the easiest setting there is).

Enjoy, I do.

I agree with you as does the publisher of IEEE Intelligent Systems in a recent editorial of his.

Not only is the combinatorics in Go greater than that of Chess but also the pattern recognition requirements in Go are much greater than that of Chess. With Chess, you have things like passed pawns, zugzwang, sister squares, and open files to recognize. In Go, you have things like life and death, thickness, shape, and the direction of play that you must be able to recognize. IMHO, the Go patterns are much more abstract than the Chess patterns.

However, let me take this moment to plug a great OSS Go program, GNU Go, which is the AI player part, and Panda-glGo, which simulates a Go board and can integrate with GNU Go. This is a great way for beginners to drill and improve their Go playing skills.

what age has to do with anything? I regularely get my wife angry while playing http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baduk a game that is more than 3.5ky old. Incidentaly clients for connecting with http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/ for instance, run on linux as well as on windows boxes. But that is me and my way of playing.

See here. To save you the time, here's a list of stuff I found from that story, games that sounded interesting or worth checking out.

First, I decided I should really get into Go. Some links from that Slashdot story: here, The Second Book of Go here, here, here, here, and here.

Other games:
Apples to Apples - got this for my cousin, they liked it.
Settlers of Catan - got this for myself, very nice game, try a local hobby shop or here or try Amazon.com

Others: Puerto Rico (Similar to Settlers of Catan), Lord of the Rings board game was mentioned, Kill Dr. Lucky, Deadwood, Give me the Brain, Lightspeed Games, Fluxx is fun, very random and quirky.

There's more! Mind Trap
Munchkin , Heroscape, Ticket to Ride, Mystery of the Abbey, Memoir '44, Queen's Necklace at Days of Wonder, Bang!, Betrayal at House on the Hill, Articulate
Killer Bunnies (and Quest for the Magic Carrot), Illuminati , Acquire .

Some other reviews/top game lists here:
here
here
here

Happy gaming!

or IGS

He can still play the best game ever created (IMHO): Go. And there are several severs where you can play online. IGS and KGS being the most popular

I've lost several YEARS of my life to go, but I would do it all again...

You'll learn so much about yourself, its unbelievable.

I am one of the people on slashdot who actually plays the game. It is quite a simple game, black and white stones, placed on intersections. Although quite simple, it is hard to master.

The Daily Yomiuri - A Japanese Daily Newspaper that includes a go collumn, has frequent discussions about pro matches, contains joseki, and best of all contains an archive of previous go collumns that teaches go to beginners. I greatly enjoy reading this site, but of late have not had the time.

GoBase.org, who could forget this essential site (actually I almost did) not only for beginners but for experienced players, contains many, many problems, classic games, wonderfull resource.

The American Go Association - Contains many resources for those who are interested in learning about playing go.

The Korean Baduk Association might be most helpfull for you, however I do not know how much help they can be to english speeking people.

IGS (Internet Go Server), synonymous with online and go, will provide you with many resources about go, and even have an online client that you can play people throughout the world.

KGS is another online go server, apparently it has lectures every week.

The Interactive Way To Go is a link my brother just gave me, it contains some go problems, hope it helps.

Well, I hope to see you on igs soon. Please enjoy the resources that I dug up from you from my personal link folder, they will be invaluable in your progress in learning go.

I play online on KGS, which has as its client CGoban2 - it's written in Java, is a really nice client, runs under mac/linux just fine.

Alternately, find a game between equal level players a bit higher than you (10 ranks maybe - a new player starts at rank 30k and goes to 1k, so look for a game between high teen kyu players) and just watch what they do. Save the game when you're done and then use CGoban to edit it and play through. The suggestions I've seen say to first guess where you think they will play (hard at beginning, but not too difficult once the fighting gets heavy) and then, whether right or wrong, try to understand why they played there. Then find a game between some dan level players, watch that, and repeat.

Most of all though, the best way is to play against people your own skill, and KGS (and others such as IGS) do automatic rankings so it's pretty easy to find a game most of the time.

Once you get around 25-20 kyu, then start looking more at the theory. I recommend Kogo's Joseki Dictionary - a dictionary of openings that you can load up in CGoban (among other clients).

At long last we have proof that Go is better than Chess. Nobody compromised their server : )

Pandanet was formerly known as IGS, and can eat your time worse than /. any day.

Chess has proved the value of a brute force approach--even without a lot of AI routines, simply searching the game tree and adding up the value of the men left on the board is a workable algorithm. Good chess programs improve on that significantly with rules to prune the tree search, and further rules to score a board position. That doesn't work so well in Go: There are 361 points on a Go board, with a typical game lasting some 200 moves--an unimaginably large number of game combinations. Worse, there's no easy way to assign a value to a board position once you've brute forced your way through the combinations. The combination of these two factors is one reason why there are no really good Go playing programs, as there are in Chess.

Go is a great game to play on the Internet. You can order all the books you need to get you started, and then you can play on the 'net. There's not bad Go implementations at Yahoo Games, etc., but eventually you will move up to the real go servers like Kiseido or Panda, both located in Japan.

A zen master was once asked, "What is the greatest game ever invented by man?"

He replied, "Chess, of course."

His chela asked, "But, what of Go?"

The master replied, "There was go before there were men."

pandanet.co.jp

It seems this guy is attempting to patent what was previously implemented in the IGS, the NNGS, and numerous online chess servers.

It seems odd to me that it didn't occur to Mr. Goldberg that some else had probably done most of what his patents claimed before 1998. Online play, complete with subscription fees, ranking systems, and player configuration dates back to the Eighties.

You probably want to play again real people: http://www.pandanet.co.jp/English/ for the most popular game server. If you really want to play against a computer, mail me and I'll see what I can do :)