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Ask HN: Who Plays Go?

• sz 16y ago
  I learned how to play in Taiwan and it's become my favorite board game. I'm not very good though. Do you have any suggestions for improving?
  • thangalin 16y ago
    1. Play lots of 9x9 games against a stronger opponent: http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html 2. Study tsumego (life and death) problems. By study, I mean keep replaying the same positions until you can identify the sequence to live (or to kill) immediately. Study problems slightly more difficult than your own rank (maybe 1 or 2 stones). Do this for 15 minutes every day for 6 months and you will be quite strong. http://tsumego.tasuki.org/?page=tsumego http://tsumego.tasuki.org/?page=tsumego http://senseis.xmp.net/?BenjaminTeuber%2FGuideToBecomeStrong http://senseis.xmp.net/?BenjaminTeuber%2FGuideToBecomeStrong 3. Replay master games. Don't merely click through games on the computer. Get a board. Get stones. Feel the stones in your hand and think about where you would place each move. Try to discover, for yourself, why the master played the move. http://www.kiseido.com/Game.htm http://www.kiseido.com/Game.htm 4. Study fuseki theory and master fuseki player games: http://senseis.xmp.net/?TakagawaKaku http://senseis.xmp.net/?TakagawaKaku
    • Estragon 16y ago
      Do this for 15 minutes every day for 6 months and you will be quite strong. http://senseis.xmp.net/?TsumegoLounge It's not at all clear from this page how you actually get to the puzzles. (Which sound like fun.)
      • thangalin 16y ago
        Updated with more relevant links. Also, tsumego is a Google-friendly word. (Unlike Go, which is now a programming language, too. Fortunately there is baduk and weichi.)
        • Estragon 16y ago
          Thanks. That led me to this page: http://senseis.xmp.net/?ProblemsAndExercises Which contains links to actual puzzles.
    • RBerenguel 16y ago
      I would remove the playing 9x9 against igowin. It will do more harm than good. Play them in KGS, or in a play-by-email style in Littlegolem.net or Dragon Go Server, all against real persons.
    • Jd 16y ago
      It is (2) that got me. It just takes too much time that I've never had. I'm probably 14 kyu.
  • cjbprime 16y ago
    I'm in Taipei at the moment -- don't suppose you have any suggestions for a Go club to go to?
    • thangalin 16y ago
      See ludwig's comment: http://igolocal.net/ http://igolocal.net/
• RiderOfGiraffes 16y ago
  I was once 11 kyu and improving, but I realised I was getting totally absorbed in the game. As a latent obsessive compulsive I gave it up. I'm pretty sure it was the right choice, but I retain deep respect and admiration for the game. Far, far better than chess. Deep down I wish I still played ...
  • kindly 16y ago
    I think it probably was the right choice. I see it as a game that I will enjoy in retirement, and look forward to it. I actually played it instead of doing well in my math degree. I am only about a 4ku in real life (played in the odd competition). I gave up after the degree for similar reasons. I love the game as compared to chess there is real strategy involved. I am dyslexic and I find calculating locally hard i.e the kind of calculating you do in chess (dyslexics are bad at sequencing). However, in go, you have full board considerations and I am above my grade in those. In go that means I need to take a lower (than my grade) handicap from stronger players but am bad at fighting.
  • ludwig 16y ago
    You made the right choice :) I got to about 7 kyu, and then it suddenly hit me. Balance is key. Therefore you should concentrate on those aspects of your life which have become more urgent. I haven't played very much after that realization. In my view, Go (or any other hobby, really) would stand in one corner of the board. Your family, personal life, and work would be at the other three corners. As the situation on the board evolves, you would choose your best play. Focusing too much on any one area would leave you over-concentrated. It would be too inefficient. You'd easily secure one corner but lose the other three. But then, if you spread yourself too thin all over the place, trying to please everyone, including yourself, that would leave you with a vulnerable position that could fall apart at any moment. That's clearly not good either. However, if you patiently settle your stone formations before moving on the next area, if you gain strength in one corner/side before expanding towards another, if you are fluid in your decision making process when choosing a direction (life does throw you stumbling blocks doesn't it?), THEN you'd be a wise man indeed :) I do make it a point to participate in a local yearly tournament (five games over two days) whether I feel ready or not. One day, though, I will come back to Go in full-force. I'm also ludwig on KGS, btw. If anyone fancies a game, you can always reach me via twitter (@ludwig1024).
• cageface 16y ago
  It's a fascinating game but coding seems to fatigue the same bits of my brain that coding does, so I spend my recreational time doing things a bit more brainless, like Warcraft.
• Morendil 16y ago
  Stuck at 2kyu on KGS for two years, I've set the game aside temporarily, until my life situation is such that I can immerse myself in serious study. Love the game - got half a shelf of books including Invincible. There's a saying, "Go is life". Learning the game will tell you an incredible amount about yourself, about determinism and chance and skill, about depth and limits and building knowledge and passing on knowledge. For a software person there is a lot to learn about complexity and patterns. There are deep lessons about not fooling yourself, about the idea that a strategy for success emerges in surprising ways from ridiculously simple rules and facts of the underlying material. There isn't much of a gap between Go's simple rules (alternating play, capture, ko) and software's fundamental elements (sequence, iteration, choice) in terms of simplicity, and likewise these simple rules combine to yield complexities that challenge the best human minds.
  • thangalin 16y ago
    Hurdling the kyu wall, for me, required a leap of insight into understanding how to use thickness for attacking. The basic idea you probably already understand: when you have a wall (or otherwise fortified position), drive your opponent's weak forces into that area. As you do so you will get another wall. If this wall faces your own position, great! If it faces an enemy position, a wall gives you the opportunity to invade or reduce the op-position. Go beautifully combines strategy and tactics. In what other board games can you take a strategy like, "Besiege Wei To Rescue Zhao" and implement it, tactically, in various ways? I had a conversation with a project manager. He said that we should zip the development source files over to the test machine. I suggested that the test machine should be outfitted with the repository client (CVS) because it would be simpler solution, technically. How the goal is accomplished is not nearly as important as the goal itself. Both zipping the source and executing a "cvs update" solve the problem. And both are tactical ways of solving the strategic problem: test the latest development version in an isolated environment that is similar to production. In "Besiege Wei To Rescue Zhao" the strategic concept is to parry an attack on your forces by attacking a weak (yet slightly more valuable) enemy force. I like to think of it as the Three Kingdoms problem. Kingdom A and B are friends, but not Kingdom C. When Kingdom C attacks Kingdom B, Kingdom A can rescue B in two ways: running to B's defense or by counter-attacking Kingdom C. Counter-attacking is usually best, to avoid the least amount of bloodshed. After you've attacked a weak opponent group, you've managed to create a stronger position that you can leverage to support the group that was being assailed. Other elements that Go and programming have in common: intuition, aesthetics, and recursion.
• deleted 16y ago
  [deleted]
• mark_l_watson 16y ago
  In the late 1970s I played both the women's world champion, and a year later the South Korean national champion in exhibition games. They both mentioned that I was about 2 kyu but experience getting bruised up by an 2 dan amateur makes me think that my rating is less than that - so I would not be a good opponent for you. My older brother taught me to play when I was eight, and we played fairly equally for about 10 years, Then, within a year's time, I was consistently giving him 9 stones. Also in the late 1970s, I wrote a Go playing program I called Honnibo Warrior which played poorly. I sold it cheaply for the Apple II (written in UCSD Pascal) and actually made some real money selling the source code.
  • thangalin 16y ago
    I've had a design in the works for a few years that is a completely network-based Go AI. The idea is nothing new. It involves multiple computers, each assigned one problem from a board position. One computer might be responsible for calculating ladders, one solves tsumego problems, one to look at influence, one to apply joseki, another for yose, and so forth. Each of submits their top ten moves, in the allotted time, to a master engine. The master engine evaluates the moves (possibly using Monte Carlo simulations) and selects the best. The idea was more about the framework than the actual worker machines. The ability to add and remove different problem solvers on the fly appealed to me. One of the problem solvers, for example, could be your program, or GNU Go, or a program that runs ten Go playing AIs simultaneously, returning the "best" move from each.
    • joshstrike 16y ago
      Wow. I really dig this idea of sharded / modular network problem solvers. It would be interesting to take it a step further and let the solvers themselves negotiate their own distribution over time, CPU use, etc. - e.g. replicate all the active solvers on all the clients but allocate chunks of variable size to each depending on which evolves to be the "dominant" solver on any given CPU. You'd need an algorithm to stop Montecarlos from becoming the dominant process everywhere, probably. Montecarlo is notorious for chewing up a processor, but in various applications it often does not need to be run constantly, so the free cycles could be used for something else. I especially like the idea that this could be applied to anything, not just Go. I did something in this direction a few years ago with an a-life data processing platform that used SOAP to shard problems to groups of machines. At that point there are two issues, firstly the protocol becomes a bottleneck if you're dealing in large datasets, and secondly if you're dividing something up spatially you still have to aggregate your results. It would be the same if you divided it problematically for Go moves, unless each algorithm could give a "confidence" indicator that could be used reliably so that the master engine would not have to montecarlo each result set. That could be done if the montecarlo was moved to the sub-servers to test their own moves before sending the moves back complete with percentage wins for direct comparison in the master engine. It would chew up a lot more cycles and mean more machines, but it would remove the post-processing bottleneck.
• igravious 16y ago
  Hi thangalin, I'm "grooviest" on KGS. I'm only 7 kyu so you'll need to up-skill me to 1 dan so I can give you a nice game (hint hint). My relationship with Go is turbulent. Currently we are in an addictive (God, it's sooo addictive) phase and she is breaking my heart. My one regret in life is that I was 30 years old before I learned how to play. All those wasted years playing chess. sigh I recently moved from my native land of Ireland to snowy central Finland and one of the first things I did was find me a Go club - hello the Tengen Go Club of Jyväskylä, nice people all round.
  • thangalin 16y ago
    That's quite the adventure! Our time zones might not let us play in real time. Facebook has a Go playing app. I'd be happy to play a teaching game with you.
• RBerenguel 16y ago
  I never went beyond 14-12 kyu. I still want to improve, but life is always getting in the way (also, I get pretty nervous when playing and it is discouraging). But I also love the game.
• kapilkaisare 16y ago
  I was entranced with go via "Hikaru No Go", a Japanese anime about a boy who discovers the game through a spirit seeking the elusive 'hand of God'. I am currently at 9 kyu but am trying to better my game. Unfortunately there aren't too many Go players where I am, and this makes Go as a point of social focus difficult, as it often is in chess over here.
  • ludwig 16y ago
    > Unfortunately there aren't too many Go players where I am Put yourself on the map, just in case! http://igolocal.net/ http://igolocal.net/
    • muloka 16y ago
      Unfortunately this site doesn't accept my position. I keep getting the following: You must mark a valid location on the Google Map. I currently live in Bermuda and if there are any Go players out there traveling to or currently residing there I'd be down for a few games, I have a go board + stones.
  • cjbprime 16y ago
    Same here -- watching all of Hikaru no Go motivated me enough to get to 1-dan. Great anime.
• moconnor 16y ago
  I play (well, I have played) and agree it's an amazing, beautiful game like no other. I only reached around 10 kyu though; don't have the time for it these days.
• cies 16y ago
  i play it. it's my favorite board game: i'd say it is the best example of a well designed game :) though i do not play it online. my dad thought me how to play it at the age of 8. for some time i played it at a go club, but that never really caught on. now i play with a couple of friends or with my dad.
• philh 16y ago
  I'm philh on kgs, but these days I mostly play in person at my university club. One consequence of this is that I don't really know my rank. We have our own ladder, on which I'm currently 15.5k, but it tends to underrank people as compared to KGS. I'm probably not above 10k. If anyone's interested in a game, I can play most evenings, British time.
• spacemanaki 16y ago
  This whole thread makes me want to start learning how to play again. I don't think I have played more than about half a dozen games but it is by far the on of the most compelling games I've encountered.
• gjm11 16y ago
  I play, but not nearly often enough. I'm probably somewhere around 12k, far below thangalin's level. If there is any such thing as objective quality in board games, go is objectively the best game anyone has come up with yet. Wonderful, wonderful game. But also dangerously addictive. The fact that it's basically impossible to play a quick game doesn't help.
  • edanm 16y ago
    "there is any such thing as objective quality in board games, go is objectively the best game anyone has come up with yet" Could you please elaborate?
    • gjm11 16y ago
      I'm not sure I could. (If I could, I'd probably be able to omit the hedge at the start.) But here's the best I can do. 1. The rules of go are very simple. (Well, kinda. Use, say, the Tromp-Taylor ruleset.) 2. The resulting game is very subtle, in e.g. the following senses. (a) For any game, define an "increment" to be how much better you need to be than someone else in order to beat them 75% of the time. Then the number of increments between a total beginner and God is larger for go than for any other game I know of. (b) Same as (a), but this time define an "increment" to be how much better you can get with a week's hard work or something. -- That is, there's a lot to learn, and learning it really makes you appreciably better at the game. 3. The difficulty of the game isn't simply a matter of getting better at mechanical calculations: there's a whole lot of strategy and "good taste" and so on. 4. It seems to be an uncommonly beautiful game. Now, any good game is going to have some aesthetic appeal for its expert players. But it seems as if (a) really good go players get more out of it aesthetically than, say, really good chess players get out of chess, and (b) one starts seeing aesthetic value in the game earlier in the process of getting better than with most other games. 5. (This is, I think, mostly a consequence of #1.) It's a very flexible game: you can use a different size of board (changing how long a game takes and the tactics/strategy balance), or give one player a handicap (changing the balance between the two) while keeping the game substantially the same. This is convenient practically, and (for reasons I can't currently articulate) it seems to me that it indicates something deeper about the game: it's a kind of Platonic essence that can be instantiated in many different ways. (I wonder occasionally about playing go on a graph that isn't just a square grid. It seems like hexagonal go wouldn't be too big a stretch, whereas to make a decent hexagonal chess game you have to change lots and lots of things.) 6. (Related to #1, #4 and #5.) It's a game that can be played with enjoyment even by total beginners: it's much more approachable than chess, for instance. 7. Although there's a lot to learn about the game, the understanding:brute-facts ratio in what you need to learn is better than in, say, chess. You can play go very well while knowing scarcely any detailed opening theory, whereas to be any good at chess you need to learn a lot of lines.
• MK5 16y ago
  I started playing Go at 4 with dad and played a while of IGS (the Panda net thing) and got pretty high (around 2D). But felt in love with Starcraft which is for me, GO+Chess and in real time :p
• edanm 16y ago
  I've never played, but I'd be happy if someone could point me to the best place to learn.
  • sams99 16y ago
    If you want to learn, the easiest way to start would be on a 9 by 9 board using a program like gnu-go. Computers are awfully predictable and have a hard time even on a 9 by 9 board. Next up, I would look at checking out a local Go club, maybe read a book or two, maybe check out igs/kgs.
    • btilly 16y ago
      For an absolute beginner I'd add that the computer should give you a 9 stone handicap. Dial the handicap down as you start to get the hang of it. Move to a 13x13 when you want the game to get more complex. Raise the handicap again when you do so.
  • baby 16y ago
    You have a really good tutorial on www.gokgs.com Plus you can play there with begginers.
  • blue1 16y ago
    The "learn to play go" series of five books by Janice Kim is the best.
  • kurumo 16y ago
    http://senseis.xmp.net/ http://senseis.xmp.net/ is not bad
  • muloka 16y ago
    Easiest way to pick up the basic rules and gameplay is through: The Interactive Way to Go: http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/ http://playgo.to/iwtg/en/ Its also available in 32 other languages: http://playgo.to/iwtg/ http://playgo.to/iwtg/ -- Beyond that I recommend 9x9 games, on Windows download yourself a free copy of iGoWin: http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html http://www.smart-games.com/igowin.html or on OSX or Linux check out GnuGo. -- There's also a Linux live cd/distro with lots of learning tools by the name of Hikarunix: http://senseis.xmp.net/?Hikarunix http://senseis.xmp.net/?Hikarunix
• enki 16y ago
  there's a go club in soma. we're meeting at twitter every wednesday at 8am but have been thinking of moving a more accessible time and location and call it @somagoclub. anyone interested? (soma, san francisco)
• kia 16y ago
  By the way Go is one of the most challenging games for AI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Go
• sams99 16y ago
  I used to be 2-4k but had trouble holding 5k* on igs a few years ago. If I started playing now I would probably struggle holding 8k. Life, my daughter, 2 personal projects and work got in the way. I miss the social aspect of Go, I find the internet incarnations are too sterile. I love having a tea and a chat while playing, I spend enough time staring at the screen. Would probably play again if I found the right group. Pushing the upper kyus would require way too much work than I am willing to commit at the moment to the game. Love Go, it is truly eye opening. Talking about smoke, my Go teacher "Mr No" used to smoke 200 cigarettes a day in Go clubs in Korea.
  • thangalin 16y ago
    That's crazy! The scene here fizzled a bit when a few events happened around the same time, involving babies and our strongest players. I much prefer to play in person than online, for the same reasons you mentioned. I am planning on taking a trip next year, with a stop in Korea. Any recommendations for (smoke-free) Go clubs?
• kgosser 16y ago
  I've tried to pick it up, have not found any clubs or anything in Milwaukee, so I've had to play via computer. Due to that, I haven't been able to pick it up as much as I'd like.
  • chops 16y ago
    Another Milwaukeean! The little bit that I played was also online. I didn't (and still don't) know anyone that played, either in person or online, so I haven't had anyone I can just bombard with questions. Whenever I played online I just got slaughtered, and any pleas for "what am I doing wrong" generally went unanswered. Occasionally, I'll hit up http://goproblems.com http://goproblems.com and I struggle with all but the most obvious answers. Despite reading a book or two about the game, and the handful of games online, it just never clicked. But I remain fascinated by the game and am on the constant lookout for someone who actually knows how to play. It's been a while now since I last tried to play, but I'm always down.
• Kilimanjaro 16y ago
  Your intro read like prose. In a few short paragraphs I felt I was reading a novel. You have the touch. Are you a professional writer?
  • yaskyj 16y ago
    Not sure what you mean by prose. His writing was prose, so was yours.
    • crux 16y ago
      You're right about his semantic mix-up, but surely you knew exactly what he meant.
    • nickfox 16y ago
      Prose is just prose by any other name... :o)
  • thangalin 16y ago
    Thank you. My profession is software. I write letters on topics I feel strongly about, though. I then (e)mail them to really important people and pretend they get read. http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/letters/ http://davidjarvis.ca/dave/letters/
• spot 16y ago
  I used to play a lot on NNGS and the Palo Alto Go Club in ~98 but now I just teach. Sticking with the f2f version :) I was into the game enough that when I had a free week in a Japan, I spent it playing every day at a club.
• swah 16y ago
  Care to explain why your level decreases without practice?
  • thenduks 16y ago
    Similar to riding a bike, playing an instrument, writing code or cooking -- you never 'forget', but you definitely do get 'rusty'.
  • gcheong 16y ago
    I don't know if this is what you mean, but Kyu levels are ranked lowest to highest in decreasing numbers (lower number = higher ranking) but Dan levels are ranked lowest to highest in increasing numbers. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_ranks_and_ratings
  • thangalin 16y ago
    Go is deep. So deep that you could spend a lifetime studying only to yourself on your deathbed still discovering new techniques and concepts. The first ability people tend to lose after not playing is reading. That is, visualising a sequence of moves (without playing them) on the board and judging the positional value (similar to chess, but with astronomically more possibilities). Reading requires concentration, pattern matching (shape, tesuji, vital points), and guesswork. After reading -- the tactical part -- some higher-level concepts get lost. Forcing plays (kikashi), inducing moves, estimating the value of thickness, obscure joseki, fuseki theory, and more. There are /so/ many concepts and techniques to Go that unless you are actively studying and playing, it is nearly impossible to keep everything at the forefront of your mind.
• erikb85 16y ago
  I also play KGS under the name asdfman[4k] (at the moment). I like that game because of its simplicity. In Chess u can get nowhere without learning ur openings very deep. In Go u just need to understand how ur stones influence each other. Add some exercise in L&D and u can become a tough player without learning all those Opening Moves from scrappy, old books. I love it.
• nandemo 16y ago
  Do not play go. Just stay away it from it. I started to play go in Brazil while in high school and got addicted to it. Eventually I came to Japan to play go (I won't disclose the details because it'd be really embarrassing). Later I came to Japan to study Computer Go in grad school. I planned to to stay for 2~3 years. It's been 7 years now. I don't play go anymore, but I do harder stuff (karaoke, clubbing, etc). It's been a sort of gateway drug for me. PS: by the way, the reason an American 2-dan can slaughter a Japanese 2-dan is simply because the scales are different, mainly due to inflation in Japanese ranks. If you're AGA 2-dan (or say, European 1-dan) you should really upgrade yourself to 4-dan when coming to Japan.
  • eob 16y ago
    It sounds like a good story waiting to be told, not embarrassing. So many of our lives are spent following the path society has carved out for us; it's refreshing and interesting to hear about someone who had a desire outside of the mainstream and followed to an extreme. Did you join one of the go cram schools?
• matth 16y ago
  I was working on this for a while: yayforgo.com. I got a new job and just couldn't focus on it. Bummer! Anyone want the source code?
  • gcao 16y ago
    I'm very interested in it. It looks like it is a Python web application, right? I'm a Ruby programmer and should be able to understand the code and steal some ideas if you don't mind :-P
• timdellinger 16y ago
  Guilty as charged: I'm a go player. Not currently active, unless you count the occasional game against Many Faces Of Go (igowin) on the iPad.
• justinweiss 16y ago
  I just started playing casually earlier this year and I'm about 13-15k on DGS. I really liked the players on KGS, but it's hard for me to find an hour or two of totally uninterrupted time. DGS is so perfect for the slow pace I like to play that I wrote an iPhone client for it: http://dgs.uberweiss.net http://dgs.uberweiss.net When I started playing, it was frustrating and confusing. Now, it's still frustrating and confusing, but it's also so much fun.
• Xurinos 16y ago
  Anyone know where I can play Capture Go at multiple levels? That is, single capture, 2-capture, 3-capture, etc? 9x9 and larger boards?
  • raganwald 16y ago
    I don't know where, but when you get there, I wrote an SPI HTML5/JS Goban for iPad/Safari that supports single capture and capture five on various boards: http://github.com/raganwald/wood_and_stones http://github.com/raganwald/wood_and_stones If you want other games like 2-capture or 3-capture, I can file an issue and add the games. And nothing's stopping you from forking, making the changes, and sending me a pull request :-)
• Tarks 16y ago
  I play, can't even remember how I heard of it but my girlfriend and I learned together a few months ago, I've just got another friend hooked on it too. Having SmartGo Kifu on the iPad and the free go Client from Pandanet has made it easier to learn. Funny thing is, a co-worker caught me playing it, then while he was slaughtering me in a lunchbreak another couple of guys came out of the woodwork too ^_^ I find it very cool that there's just one piece that can be used for everything.
• krschmidt 16y ago
  I sometimes hop on KGS, but I'm very rusty. Probably ~17k. Wonderful game. I teach it to the kids in my programming class whenever we have a few moments of free time (usually day before Thanksgiving, etc).
• lukas 16y ago
  I've been getting a little more back into go lately. Online games are hard for me for some reason and I like to play slower than most people on kgs. Back when I was active I was an AGA 5dan (probably 6dan in japan). If anyone in SF wants an in-person game I'd love to play - shoot me an email at lukas@crowdflower.com. Our office has a couple learning go players and our janitor might be around 1 dan.
• hasenj 16y ago
  I've taken some interest in it and sometimes try to play against the computer, but I'm horribly bad at it.
• seigenblues 16y ago
  Hey thangalin! I remember seeing you on KGS a few years ago. I'm. About 2-3d on kgs and would be happy for a game. Also, if any go players in CA are interested, next years US Go Congress will be in Santa Barbara, 1st week in August!
  • thangalin 16y ago
    That was around my peak, when I could battle a 4d KGS player with a flame's chance in space of winning (that is to say: slim to none). I don't have a lot of time for real-time games. (Working, travelling, social activities, writing, saving the world, you know how it goes.) A non-real-time game would be ideal. http://apps.facebook.com/gothegame/ http://apps.facebook.com/gothegame/
• clvv 16y ago
  I lived in China during my childhood, and one of the things that I was involuntary involved in was playing Go, my parents simply made me do it. Despite the fact that I didn't really like it, I still kept learning it for several year. And by the time when I finally convinced my parents that I was not going to or even want to be a professional Go player, I was amateur 4 dan by Chinese standard, and I was about 10 years old. I stopped playing since then, but I can still pick it up and play once in a while, maybe with a skill level of around 2 dan I guess. Look back from now, Go looks interesting, but when I was forced to learn it at the age of 7, it was all boring and dull.
• ericlavigne 16y ago
  I just found out that Go is a popular game among Clojure programmers. This is how the speakers at the first Clojure conference celebrated the night before the conference. http://twitter.com/cemerick/status/28359615311 http://twitter.com/cemerick/status/28359615311
• muloka 16y ago
  I always thought this would be a great game to teach to under privileged youth and the homeless. Its also relatively easy to put together a makeshift go board. At most all one needs is white and black paint, brushes, rocks, a piece of plywood or plastic, and something straight to make the lines. You could even teach them how to make their own board and pieces.
• jedediah 16y ago
  I'm jedediah on KGS, and would welcome any game, though I'm a meager ~20k, as I've just started playing.
• realitygrill 16y ago
  I got to about 2kyu on KGS and was very addicted. Getting beyond this apparently required me to seriously dedicate myself to studying, though, and I had to deal with my normal life. So I haven't played in over a year. I hope to start playing again sometime.
• marze 16y ago
  For the vast majority of games people play, there exists a computer opponent that can beat just about anyone. Go is an exception. Even a moderately experienced amateur can beat the best computer opponent easily. I think this says something about the richness of the game.
• gcao 16y ago
  Hi thangalin, Nice to see your post about Go. I'm from China and have been playing Go for more than 20 years. I started to play in high school and improved a lot in college. My current ranking is AGA 5~6D. I don't play very often recently except play turn-based games on my own web site (www.go-cool.org). Because of my addiction to the game, I even created a variation of Go, Daoqi, which removes border of Go board and makes all positions have same importance. This new game gives players a new and different enjoyment. I'm also a programmer and have spent a lot of time on side projects. I created a Javascript based game viewer (github.com/gcao/jsgameviewer), a Ruby on Rails application which integrates with a Go forum (http://www.go-cool.org/app http://www.go-cool.org/app) Like I said, I'm happy to see your post and comments from fellow Go players. Hope I can play with you one day.
  • gastlygem 16y ago
    哈,我一定在tom論壇見過你!
• Willwhatley 16y ago
  9k KGS. Same question as OP, but addressed to kyu players-?
• epynonymous 16y ago
  my dad and uncle are fanaticso, send me your contact information, i'll hook you two up.
• adewale 16y ago
  I play as 'adewale' on KGS and I'm currently a 9 kyu. Although, as you can see: http://www.gokgs.com/servlet/graph/adewale-en_US.png http://www.gokgs.com/servlet/graph/adewale-en_US.png , my ranking tends to fluctuate.
• inimino 16y ago
  I play online very rarely (about 1d on IGS and KGS ranks). Lately I've started a couple games on DGS. I'd welcome a game on DGS with anyone from Hacker News.