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Play Go - On A Mobius Strip?
Lewey Geselowitz writes "Freed Go is a new freely downloadable game for Windows and Mac OS X that extends the 'game of Go' on any arbitrary 3d graph. These include Mobius strips, spheres, tori, cubes and so forth, and even a few flat boards but with 3, 5 or 6 neighbored nodes. To anyone who has played the game, or is interested in this great game, I assure you that you will find this site interesting and it will help you expand your understanding of the game." There's also Freed Invasion - looks like these are both from the author of the similarly unconventional Quake II stereogram implementation, as previously mentioned on Slashdot Games.
I've played go a little bit myself, but I'm not very good at it. For a game with so few rules, it's surprisingly complicated. Here's more information if you're interested in learning about the game, and here's a more in-depth explaination of the rules.
-jim
This is an interesting idea, and actually quite worthwhile and might provide a seasoned player with new insight into the game.
I have played chess from the time I was a small child. I initially took interest in Go after seeing Pi (Aronofski's cyberpunk-influenced film about a mathematician trying to predict the stock market). It's a wonderful game, and I think its simplicity and beauty far succeeds that of chess.
The beautiful thing about Go is that the rules are extremely simple:
Black starts first. Turns alternate. In each turn, you are allowed to place a piece of your colour on an empty position. If a group of the enemy pieces are surrounded by your pieces (i.e. your pieces occupy all immediately adjacent free points around the enemy group), then you have captured the enemy group, and remove those pieces.
The only other rule is a small exception for the placement of certain pieces to avoid repeated board states.
But that's the entire game rules. The rules themselves don't even give you a _hint_ as to how to play the game effectively. Go strategy revolves around much higher level constructs that are a result of these few basic rules.
Given the simplicity of the rules, it's easy to generalize Go based on graphs. The typical 19x19 board can be thought of as a graph, with each internal position being represented by a node of degree four, each side position being represented by a node of degree three, and the four corner positions being nodes of degree two. Groups of pieces can be formalized as sets of connected subgraphs in which all nodes have the same colour. And 'capture' defined as a colouring of an uncoloured node, such that the state of the graph changes where a connected subgraph of opposite-colored nodes which used to have at least one adjacent uncoloured node, now has no adjacent uncoloured nodes.
Go is one of the few games where the rules are so basic, that it probably works without hitches even when you change something as fundamental as the "board" layout.
Anyway, for those of you who do not know Go.. I would strongly suggest trying it. You _WILL_ suck at first. You will suck _hard_. But keep playing, and you'll notice that you start seeing patterns.. that for certain configurations of portions of the board, you feel "good" or "bad" about it.. that you instinctively seek to establish certain kinds of configurations on the board. It's really amazing the way the game changes your brain in ways that you don't even fully understand.
Go is the ultimate board game. Do yourself a favour and check it out. It's worth it. Screw artificial computer strategy games where the complexity of the game is a side-effect of the complexity of the rules.. and the games aren't even that complex in the end. Forget Master of Orion, or Civilization, or any number of other turn-based strategy games. Try a strategy game where the complexity is intrinsic to the game itself.. and is limited only by the ability of your mind.
-Laxitive
The Go World already has readily accepted the idea of playing Go on oddly shaped boards, and considers it to be a completely valid, if a little silly, form of Go. I was chatting on KGS the other day and someone was talking about a 9x9x9 board where each stone has 24 liberties, and everyone seemed to accept that it was Go, even if it was a completely absurd form. Anyway, even in the standardized form of Go, there are a few different kinds of board, anyway. 5x5 is very different from 9x9, which is very different from 19x19, which is very different from 38x38. This merely makes experimentation much easier.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
For anyone interesting in learning about the game of Go, including some variations that are discussed and sometimes played, please check out http://senseis.xmp.net . It has a lot of useful information for beginners and a very friendly community.
Anybody interested in seeing what professional players might make of go on oddly shaped boards (and playing simultaneous games against professionals, or entering in the U.S. Open tournament, or watching professional games played live and commented upon by other pros, or just being there and breathing in the excitement of go) should try and make it to the U.S. Go Congress this summer.
It's in Rochester, NY this year, hosted by the Rochester Institute of Technology. It's a full week, from July 31st to August 6th. You can register online at http://gocongress.org.
Register! Register now! There are expected to be 400 participants, so there will be people to play no matter what your skill level. And stronger players are almost always willing to give teaching games or quick lessons, if you ask nicely.
This will be my first congress, and I'm really hyped up about it. I'm trying to become 1st dan before the US Open (I'm 1 kyu right now, been playing for 15 months).
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