Another thing I like about go is that the rules feel less path dependant. Like, if you take one of the rules away, you’ll recognize the need for it and there’s a good chance you’ll reintroduce it either exactly the same, or functionally almost equivalent. You can ask “why is the rule this way” and get an answer based in game design.
This seems clearly not true in chess. Any of the pieces could have a different moveset, or you could rearrange the starting position, and you’d get a viable game but one where strategy might be very different. “Why is the rule this way” might have a partial answer based in game design: I think pawns moving two spaces was to speed up the early game, and I’ve heard the reason for checkmate instead of capturing the king is to do with balance. But it’ll also very often just be “because that’s what chess players collectively decided over time”.
(IIRC the difference between checkmate and capture is: with checkmate, you need to capture the king, but you need to do so without putting the opponent in a position where if they don’t move you can’t immediately capture, but any move they make leaves you able to capture. That would be stalemate.)
It’s not perfectly true in go, but my sense is it’s a lot more true. (True enough that different countries use different rules but can still play each other.) “Why do we count territory?” If not you’d just spend a long time filling in space that you already control, that would be boring. “Why do we have a ko rule?” To avoid infinite loops.
You can have variants on ko, but my sense is people tend to play pretty much the same for all reasonable choices here. You can choose area scoring or territory scoring (do I remember those terms right?) but I think those work out the same to +/- one point in most cases.
Exceptions here are that most rulesets seem to forbid suicide, which seems pointless to me; 19x19 as the standard board size seems pretty clearly path dependant; and the Japanese rules seem bizarrely complicated.
This seems clearly not true in chess. Any of the pieces could have a different moveset, or you could rearrange the starting position, and you’d get a viable game but one where strategy might be very different.
The AlphaZero work on evaluating chess variants seems to establish that a lot of chess variants would be fine. But DM only looks at chess, and I don’t know of a list of equally-attractive looking Go variations that one could test this way.
I think the “why”s of chess are also about game design—just about decisions that could have gone various other ways. Go is certainly more elegant; chess has more character: these are essentially opposites, since each arbitrary-but-reasonable rule added is a loss for elegance and a win (potentially) for character. (a rule that introduces more symmetry than it breaks goes in the other direction—but such rules don’t feel arbitrary)
Another thing I like about go is that the rules feel less path dependant. Like, if you take one of the rules away, you’ll recognize the need for it and there’s a good chance you’ll reintroduce it either exactly the same, or functionally almost equivalent. You can ask “why is the rule this way” and get an answer based in game design.
This seems clearly not true in chess. Any of the pieces could have a different moveset, or you could rearrange the starting position, and you’d get a viable game but one where strategy might be very different. “Why is the rule this way” might have a partial answer based in game design: I think pawns moving two spaces was to speed up the early game, and I’ve heard the reason for checkmate instead of capturing the king is to do with balance. But it’ll also very often just be “because that’s what chess players collectively decided over time”.
(IIRC the difference between checkmate and capture is: with checkmate, you need to capture the king, but you need to do so without putting the opponent in a position where if they don’t move you can’t immediately capture, but any move they make leaves you able to capture. That would be stalemate.)
It’s not perfectly true in go, but my sense is it’s a lot more true. (True enough that different countries use different rules but can still play each other.) “Why do we count territory?” If not you’d just spend a long time filling in space that you already control, that would be boring. “Why do we have a ko rule?” To avoid infinite loops.
You can have variants on ko, but my sense is people tend to play pretty much the same for all reasonable choices here. You can choose area scoring or territory scoring (do I remember those terms right?) but I think those work out the same to +/- one point in most cases.
Exceptions here are that most rulesets seem to forbid suicide, which seems pointless to me; 19x19 as the standard board size seems pretty clearly path dependant; and the Japanese rules seem bizarrely complicated.
The AlphaZero work on evaluating chess variants seems to establish that a lot of chess variants would be fine. But DM only looks at chess, and I don’t know of a list of equally-attractive looking Go variations that one could test this way.
I think the “why”s of chess are also about game design—just about decisions that could have gone various other ways. Go is certainly more elegant; chess has more character: these are essentially opposites, since each arbitrary-but-reasonable rule added is a loss for elegance and a win (potentially) for character.
(a rule that introduces more symmetry than it breaks goes in the other direction—but such rules don’t feel arbitrary)