Go is a board game played on a
grid, with pieces being placed at the
intersections
of grid lines, rather
than in the middle of them. Go boards have a number of peculiarities, including the
fact that the aspect ratio is approximately 0.91 (instead of the usual unity for
western games). This is done so that with perspective, the board appears square.
Another is that go pieces (called stones) are actually slightly larger than the spacing
on the board allows, thus requiring stones to be placed partially underneath one
another to fit, producing a state of mild disorder on a full board.
Go is played by players alternately placing stones on the board, with one player using white stones and the other black stones. There are several sets of rules (Japanese and Chinese) as to how play progresses and scoring is done, but the basic object is to surround as much "territory" as possible. When a group of one player's stones are completely surrounded the other player's (i.e., there are no holes and the stones of one color have stones of the other color adjacent to each possible location horizontally and vertically), the surrounded stones are "captured" by the other player. Go has a number of special terms to refer to specific board configurations, including "atari."
Sensei's Library provides a large collection of go resources, including extensive links to additional material.
The images above show an empty go board and a go board near the end of a game.
There are estimated to be about
possible positions on a
board (Beeler
et al.
1972, Flammenkamp). The number of
-move go games are 1, 362, 130683, 47046242, ... (OEIS
A007565
).
See also
Gomoku
Portions of this entry contributed by
Brian
Downing
Explore with Wolfram|Alpha
References
Beeler, M.
et al.
Item 96 in Beeler, M.; Gosper, R. W.; and Schroeppel, R.
HAKMEM.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Artificial Intelligence
Laboratory, Memo AIM-239, p. 35, Feb. 1972.
http://www.inwap.com/pdp10/hbaker/hakmem/proposed.html#item96
.
Berlekamp,
E. and Wolfe, D.
Mathematical
Go: Chilling Gets the Last Point.
Wellesley, MA: A K Peters, 1994.
Bewersdorff,
J. "Go: A Classical Game with a Modern Theory." Ch. 25 in
Luck,
Logic, & White Lies: The Mathematics of Games.
Wellesley, MA: A K Peters,
pp. 218-249, 2005.
Bewersdorff, J. "Go und Mathematik."
http://www.bewersdorff-online.de/go/
.
Culin,
S. "Pa-tok--Pebble Game." §75 in
Games
of the Orient: Korea, China, Japan.
Rutland, VT: Charles E. Tuttle,
pp. 91-101, 1965.
Flammenkamp, A. "A Short, Concise Ruleset
of Go."
http://www.uni-bielefeld.de/~achim/gorules.html
.
Hollosi,
A. and Pahle, M. "Sensei's Library."
http://senseis.xmp.net/
.
Kraitchik,
M. "Go." §12.4 in
Mathematical
Recreations.
New York: W. W. Norton, pp. 279-280, 1942.
Lasker,
E.
Go
and Go-Moku.
New York: Dover, 1960.
Sloane, N. J. A.
Sequence
A007565
/M5447 in "The On-Line
Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences."
Referenced on Wolfram|Alpha
Go
Cite this as:
Downing, Brian
and
Weisstein, Eric W.
"Go." From
MathWorld
--A Wolfram Web
Resource.
https://mathworld.wolfram.com/Go.html
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