Play Go - On A Mobius Strip? 25
Lewey Geselowitz writes "Freed Go is a new freely downloadable game for Windows and Mac OS X that extends the 'game of Go' on any arbitrary 3d graph. These include Mobius strips, spheres, tori, cubes and so forth, and even a few flat boards but with 3, 5 or 6 neighbored nodes. To anyone who has played the game, or is interested in this great game, I assure you that you will find this site interesting and it will help you expand your understanding of the game." There's also Freed Invasion - looks like these are both from the author of the similarly unconventional Quake II stereogram implementation, as previously mentioned on Slashdot Games.
I'm a big fan of Go (Score:5, Interesting)
Because I'll clue you in, just because it has the rules of Go, doesn't mean it is Go. This is the result of boredom and a little too much use of artistic license.
You're not playing Go on a mobius strip, you're playing something else on a Mobius strip with the same rules. Feh.
I know about a billion Chinese people who would mod this as +5, insightful, but I have a feeling I'm going to get -1, flamebait. Enjoy.
Re:I'm a big fan of Go (Score:1)
I completely (dis)agree... (Score:4, Interesting)
In spiritual terms, I would. Go, as I see it, encourages thought, strategy, willingness to sacrifice, looking at the big picture, thinking ahead, getting your priorities right, etc. I used to be utter rubbish at Go: I though that since two eyes were immortal, if I got two eyes, I'd have a huge advantage over somebody without them. Needless to say, I lost every game while playing like that. I'm still probably rubbish, but at least it's uselessness as opposed to stupidity. </digression>
As I said, Go is a game about strategy. If you play on a diffeent board, you still need strategy, perhaps moreso. If it follows the rules of Go (excluding those relating to board layout) and encourages thought, it's Go. If it doesn't follow the rules or doesn't bring forth your inner deviousness, it isn't.
Re:I'm a big fan of Go (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm a big fan of Go (Score:2)
About Go (Score:4, Informative)
I've played go a little bit myself, but I'm not very good at it. For a game with so few rules, it's surprisingly complicated. Here's more information [wikipedia.org] if you're interested in learning about the game, and here's [wikipedia.org] a more in-depth explaination of the rules.
-jim
Not for the first time (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Not for the first time (Score:1)
Kinda stupid (Score:2, Interesting)
Re not so:Kinda stupid (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Kinda stupid (Score:3, Funny)
Corners overpowered? (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm not sure what overpowered means in this context.
The corners are easier to defend and create a base for expansion along the sides, true. But they lack influence in the center. You can do just as well pinning your opponent's stones in the corner and grabbing a chunk of the center.
Now, as a double-digit kyu [nyu.edu], I like to try for corners. But that's because I still can't estimate influence from other stones worth diddly so I have difficulty building towards the center. Having a corner
The ultimate board game (Score:5, Informative)
I have played chess from the time I was a small child. I initially took interest in Go after seeing Pi (Aronofski's cyberpunk-influenced film about a mathematician trying to predict the stock market). It's a wonderful game, and I think its simplicity and beauty far succeeds that of chess.
The beautiful thing about Go is that the rules are extremely simple:
Black starts first. Turns alternate. In each turn, you are allowed to place a piece of your colour on an empty position. If a group of the enemy pieces are surrounded by your pieces (i.e. your pieces occupy all immediately adjacent free points around the enemy group), then you have captured the enemy group, and remove those pieces.
The only other rule is a small exception for the placement of certain pieces to avoid repeated board states.
But that's the entire game rules. The rules themselves don't even give you a _hint_ as to how to play the game effectively. Go strategy revolves around much higher level constructs that are a result of these few basic rules.
Given the simplicity of the rules, it's easy to generalize Go based on graphs. The typical 19x19 board can be thought of as a graph, with each internal position being represented by a node of degree four, each side position being represented by a node of degree three, and the four corner positions being nodes of degree two. Groups of pieces can be formalized as sets of connected subgraphs in which all nodes have the same colour. And 'capture' defined as a colouring of an uncoloured node, such that the state of the graph changes where a connected subgraph of opposite-colored nodes which used to have at least one adjacent uncoloured node, now has no adjacent uncoloured nodes.
Go is one of the few games where the rules are so basic, that it probably works without hitches even when you change something as fundamental as the "board" layout.
Anyway, for those of you who do not know Go.. I would strongly suggest trying it. You _WILL_ suck at first. You will suck _hard_. But keep playing, and you'll notice that you start seeing patterns.. that for certain configurations of portions of the board, you feel "good" or "bad" about it.. that you instinctively seek to establish certain kinds of configurations on the board. It's really amazing the way the game changes your brain in ways that you don't even fully understand.
Go is the ultimate board game. Do yourself a favour and check it out. It's worth it. Screw artificial computer strategy games where the complexity of the game is a side-effect of the complexity of the rules.. and the games aren't even that complex in the end. Forget Master of Orion, or Civilization, or any number of other turn-based strategy games. Try a strategy game where the complexity is intrinsic to the game itself.. and is limited only by the ability of your mind.
-Laxitive
Re:The ultimate board game (Score:2)
No it's not -- you didn't explain how to decide the winner, which is far less trivial.
Re:The ultimate board game (Score:4, Interesting)
The fact that there are multiple scoring systems emphasizes the fact that the game is not about the score you get.
In most games you play, there are areas of the board which you are happy with, because you were able to play well, and make headway into enemy territory and capture territory, or successfully defend against a well planned attack.. and then there are areas you feel that you did badly in.
But regardless, when you are done with the game, the finished board state reflects both your triumphs and your failures. It's not an all-or-nothing mentality that occurs with games like chess, where it doesn't matter how well you executed some plan, if you still end up getting checkmated.
The scoring is an afterthought to me. An exercise at the end to mark some numbers down. Most of the time, I don't even do it. It's more fun to talk with the opponent about the progress of the game, and explain your strategy, and listen to his strategy, and compare the results of the clash of ideas on an informal basis based on the layout of the endgame board.
-Laxitive
Re:The ultimate board game (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:The ultimate board game (Score:3, Interesting)
Now, add some ants on it! (Score:3, Funny)
A Place to Start (Score:1, Informative)
Re:A Place to Start (Score:3, Informative)
generalizing Go even farther (Score:3, Interesting)
Go variants at the Congress (Score:4, Informative)
It's in Rochester, NY this year, hosted by the Rochester Institute of Technology. It's a full week, from July 31st to August 6th. You can register online at http://gocongress.org [gocongress.org].
Register! Register now! There are expected to be 400 participants, so there will be people to play no matter what your skill level. And stronger players are almost always willing to give teaching games or quick lessons, if you ask nicely.
This will be my first congress, and I'm really hyped up about it. I'm trying to become 1st dan before the US Open (I'm 1 kyu right now, been playing for 15 months).
a bit of overkill on the eye candy (Score:2)
But the same thing could have been accomplished much more quickly by simply displaying a 2-d board and defining how the edges are connected (see mathworld [wolfram.com] for the notation.) The usual Go board configuration is the "disc", but you could play Go on the Klein bottle [wolfram.com] if you wished.
In the end, I