Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

I was inspired to write about this game while reading the chess thread.

Go is a very simple chinese game, that can take a very long time and be very addictive.

By simple I mean that the rules are very simple to learn, and it can seem easy to play at first. But once you go into it your mind makes loops making loops making loops. I played it once and found it brilliant!

For those who don't know what I'm on about, Go requires a square board of lines forming rows&colums, a certain number of black and white pieces, and an oponent.



the one in black starts. one by one, you and your oponent place pieces on the board, on the row/column intersections.

The aim is to make points. You can do this in 2 ways
either by surrounding the oponent's pieces, like this

in which case you take off the board the pieces you have surrounded. They're called "prisonners". If the oponent then puts a piece inside the "eye" you have formed, it is automatically taken away.
The other way to make points is to control as much territory as you can, by making "eyes" that are impossible to take (ie that have at least 2 free spaces in the middle).

It's best to start with miniboards like 9x9 spaces.

to get more familiar with the game there's alxays usgo.org

there was a movie a few years back called, i think, Pi (like the mathematical constant) which was sort of a better but fictional version of a beautiful mind or something similar. a mathematician who thinks that he can find a formula that will decode all the fundamental patterns or structures of the universe or reality. in this movie, if i am not mistaken, two of the characters play the game of Go.