Go Board Game

A Go Board Game is a two-person zero-sum, perfect-information, partisan, deterministic board abstract strategy game that follows go game rules.

• Context:
  • It can typically involve Go Game Stone Placement on go game board intersections rather than squares.
  • It can typically require Go Game Territory Control through go game stone positioning and go game influence building.
  • It can typically utilize Go Game Capture Mechanics through go game stone surrounding.
  • It can typically have 361 go game starting moves on a standard 19×19 go game board.
  • It can typically have hundreds of go game possible moves during mid-game positions.
  • It can typically require Go Game Life and Death Analysis to determine go game group viability.
  • It can typically be difficult to develop a Go Board Strength Heuristic due to go game position complexity.
  • It can typically have Go Game Cultural Significance in go game East Asian context.
  • ...
  • It can often be played on smaller Go Game Boards such as 9×9 or 13×13 for go game learning or go game quick play.
  • It can often utilize Go Game Handicap System to balance go game player skill difference.
  • It can often be scored using Go Game Japanese Rules or Go Game Chinese Rules with slight differences in go game scoring method.
  • It can often feature Go Game Ko Rule to prevent go game infinite position repetition.
  • It can often involve Go Game Opening Patterns known as go game joseki in the go game corner positions.
  • ...
  • It can range from being a Beginner Go Game to being a Professional Go Game, depending on its go game player skill level.
  • It can range from being a Blitz Go Game to being a Multi-Day Go Game, depending on its go game time control.
  • It can range from being an Opening Phase Go Game to being an Endgame Phase Go Game, depending on its go game progression stage.
  • It can range from being a Territorial Go Game to being an Influence-Oriented Go Game, depending on its go game strategic approach.
  • It can range from being a Human-vs-Human Go Game to being a Human-vs-Machine Go Game to being a Machine-vs-Machine Go Game, depending on its go game player type.
  • ...
  • It can be solved by a Go Playing System that implements a go game playing algorithm.
  • It can demonstrate Computational Complexity through its vast go game state space (10^761 possible positions).
  • It can preserve Traditional Game Heritage through go game tournament structure and go game ranking system.
  • It can serve as a Machine Learning Challenge for go game artificial intelligence development.
  • ...
• Examples:
  • Historical Go Games, such as:
    • Ancient Go Game Recordings from go game Chinese and Japanese manuscripts.
    • The Ear-Reddening Game (1846) between Honinbo Shusaku and Inoue Genan Inseki demonstrating go game strategic brilliance.
    • Atomic Bomb Game (1945) between Iwamoto Kaoru and Hashimoto Utaro during go game wartime period.
  • Professional Tournament Go Games, such as:
    • Meijin Title Go Game between Yuta Iyama and Keigo Yamashita (2012) showcasing go game modern professional play.
    • Lee Sedol vs Gu Li Jubango (2014) featuring go game high-level rivalry.
    • Ing Cup Go Games demonstrating go game international competition.
  • AI vs Human Go Games, such as:
    • AlphaGo versus Lee Sedol Go Game (2016) demonstrating go game AI breakthrough through go game deep neural network application.
    • AlphaGo Zero versus AlphaGo Go Game showing go game self-learning AI capability.
    • KataGo versus Professional Go Games showcasing go game modern AI strength.
  • Go Game Variants, such as:
    • Capture Go Game for go game simplified learning.
    • Rengo Go Game featuring go game team play.
    • 9×9 Go Game for go game quick tactical practice.
  • ...
• Counter-Examples:
  • Chess, which uses differentiated game pieces with piece-specific movement patterns rather than go game identical stones with go game uniform placement rules.
  • Checkers, which features forced capture rule unlike go game optional capture and uses a checker game diagonal movement system instead of go game intersection placement.
  • Xiangqi (Chinese Chess), which employs game piece movement rather than go game stone placement and uses game piece capture by displacement instead of go game stone capture by surrounding.
  • Shogi (Japanese Chess), which allows captured game piece reuse unlike go game permanent stone removal and focuses on game piece checkmate rather than go game territory control.
  • Connect Four, which uses sequential dropping mechanism rather than go game free board placement and has a different winning condition based on alignment instead of go game territory.
• See: Monte Carlo Tree Search, Abstract Strategy Game, Deep Neural Network, Alpha-Beta Pruning, Game State Complexity.

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References

2016

• https://deepmind.com/research/alphago/
  • QUOTE: The game of Go originated in China 3,000 years ago. The rules of the game are simple: players take turns to place black or white stones on a board, trying to capture the opponent's stones or surround empty space to make points of territory. As simple as the rules are, Go is a game of profound complexity. There are an astonishing 10 to the power of 170 possible board configurations - more than the number of atoms in the known universe - making Go a googol times more complex than Chess.

2016

• (Silver et al., 2016) ⇒ David Silver, Aja Huang, Chris J. Maddison, Arthur Guez, Laurent Sifre, George van den Driessche, Julian Schrittwieser, Ioannis Antonoglou, Veda Panneershelvam, Marc Lanctot, Sander Dieleman, Dominik Grewe, John Nham, Nal Kalchbrenner, Ilya Sutskever, Timothy Lillicrap, Madeleine Leach, Koray Kavukcuoglu, Thore Graepel, and Demis Hassabis. (2016). “Mastering the Game of Go with Deep Neural Networks and Tree Search.” In: Nature, 529(7587). doi:10.1038/nature16961

2015

• http://www.technologyreview.com/view/533496/why-neural-networks-look-set-to-thrash-the-best-human-go-players-for-the-first-time/
  • QUOTE: Experts think there are two reasons why computers have failed to master Go. The first is the sheer number of moves that are possible at each stage of the game. Go players have 19 x 19 = 361 possible starting moves and there are usually hundreds of possible moves at any point in the game. By contrast, the number of moves in chess is usually about 50.

    The second problem is that computers find it difficult to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of a board position. In chess, simply adding up the value of each piece left on the board gives a reasonable indication of the strength of a player’s position. But this does not work in Go. “Counting the number of stones each player has is a poor indicator of who is winning,” say Clark and Storkey.

2014

• (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_%28game%29#Computers_and_Go Retrieved:2014-12-02.
  • In combinatorial game theory terms, Go is a zero-sum, perfect-information, partisan, deterministic strategy game, putting it in the same class as chess, checkers (draughts) and Reversi (Othello); however it differs from these in its game play. Although the rules are simple, the practical strategy is extremely complex.

2014b

• (Wikipedia, 2014) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/go_(game) Retrieved:2014-11-22.
  • Go is a board game involving two players that originated in ancient China more than 2,500 years ago. It was considered one of the four essential arts of a cultured Chinese scholar in antiquity. Its earliest written reference dates back to the Confucian Analects.

    There is significant strategy and philosophy involved in the game, and the number of possible games is vast (10⁷⁶¹ compared, for example, to the 10¹²⁰ possible in chess), despite its relatively simple rules. The two players alternately place black and white playing pieces, called “stones", on the vacant intersections ("points") of a boards|board with a 19x19 grid of lines. Beginners often play on smaller 9×9 and 13×13 boards, and archaeological evidence shows that game was played in earlier centuries on a board with a 17×17 grid. By the time the game had spread to Korea and Japan in about the 5th and 7th centuries AD respectively, however, boards with a 19×19 grid had become standard. The objective of the game — as the translation of its name implies — is to have surrounded a larger total area of the board with one's stones than the opponent by the end of the game, although this result typically involves many more intricacies than simply using surrounding areas directly. Once placed on the board, stones may not be moved, but stones may be removed from the board if captured — this is done by surrounding an opposing stone or group of stones by occupying all orthogonally-adjacent points. The two players place stones alternately until they reach a point at which neither player wishes to make another move; the game has no set ending conditions beyond this. When a game concludes, the territory is counted along with captured stones and komi (points added to the score of the player with the white stones as compensation for playing second) to determine the winner. Games may also be won by resignation. As of mid-2008, there were well over 40 million Go players worldwide, the overwhelming majority of them living in East Asia. , the International Go Federation has a total of 74 member countries and four Association Members covering multiple countries.

2014c

• Clark, Christopher, and Amos Storkey. “Teaching Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to Play Go." arXiv preprint arXiv:1412.3409 (2014).

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