The Aperiodical 

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Learning to play Go: computer edition

By Katie Steckles. Posted January 28, 2016



In a remarkable example of us being psychic (or, what’s also known as ‘a coincidence’), our recently posted introduction to the game of Go has been made more topical by actual Go-related news.

The game of Go has long been considered a difficult game for artificial intelligences to play – much more so than chess, which has plenty of computer players. A Wired article from 2014 describes Go as ‘the ancient game that computers still can’t win’. As well as having a much larger set of possible games (${10}^{761}$, as opposed to ${10}^{120}$ in chess), Go also has highly complicated strategy, compared to its simple rules, and moves made early on in the game can result in important changes to the state of the board further down the line.

Learning to play Go

By Robert Woolley. Posted January 27, 2016



We bumped into Robert at the last MathsJam conference. He spoke so enthusiastically about Go, and how easy it is to get started, that we asked him if he could write a guide for someone who wants to get into the game. Here it is!

This article is designed for those who want to learn Go or read about a way of teaching it.

Go is an ancient game from Asia (being deliberately vague here). The reasons I love this game are the simplicity of the rules and the fact it has an effective handicap system. The rule system means it is great to introduce to people who may not have a background in games. The handicap allows beginners to play world champions and for both to have a challenging game.