My experience is that neither the Go players nor the philosophers have deep understanding of Go. The Go players have practice in the culture of Go, while philosophers often know philosophy.
The problem is that Go is actually not a game, while people believe that it is. Go are belief systems, and cultures, and in that respect similar to Zen.
The reason that Go is not a game, is that it do not have clear rules. The only people I know that have practical and deep understanding of Go is John Tromp, who has made some nice Go rules, and Robert Jasiek, who claim to have formalized the Japanese practice into rules.
As for me, I gave up the “game” when I realized it had no true core, and the same goes for Zen.
The problem is that Go is actually not a game, while people believe that it is.
Massive semantic confusion. Just because the word “Go” is used to denote a family of games and game-like activities doesn’t mean there can’t be concrete realizations of the concept that capture most or all of its interesting qualities. Concluding that the game has “no true core” and giving it up, merely because its label is too broad for your taste, strikes me as very confused thinking.
Giving it up is rational thinking, because there is no “it” there when the label is too broad.
In Bayesian inference, it is equivalent to P( A | B v C v D v …), which is somewhat like underfitting. The space of possibilities becomes too large for it to be possible to find a good move. In games it is precisely the unclear parts of the game space that is interesting to the loosing part, because it is most likely there will be better moves there. But when it is not even possible to analyze those parts, then true optimal play regresses to quarreling about it, which is precisely what the Japanese tradition has done for at least some hundred years.
I have played enough Go to know that the concrete rules can make the endgame very different. The usual practice is to pretend it is not so, and stop the game before the endgame starts.
So Go is riddled with quarrels and pretense. Not a game in practice. More like politics, or Zen.
Optimal playing strategies in games can be very different from what people believe them to be, as examplified by the program Eurisko which won the Traveller TCS championships with very unconventional fleets. I suspect strongly that similar thing will happen for true Go games.
I might have found a variation of minimax that can tackle Go, but to use it, it MUST be possible to evaluate a Go position, at least in principle. So I will probably go for the Tromp-Taylor rules, if I get the time to do this. And perhaps the Japanese rules of Robert Jasiek.
The rules of chess don’t explicitly state whether the vast majority of moves are good ideas or bad ones. (Exceptions involve moves that would put your king in check—and that’s not bad, it’s disallowed.)
You can know all of the rules, and not be able to determine how you should react in a chess game. Because all of the principles that govern ‘good’ play arise as consequences from the explicit rules.
If proper moves were as easy to determine in chess as they were in Tic-Tac-Toe, no one would bother playing it.
My experience is that neither the Go players nor the philosophers have deep understanding of Go. The Go players have practice in the culture of Go, while philosophers often know philosophy.
The problem is that Go is actually not a game, while people believe that it is. Go are belief systems, and cultures, and in that respect similar to Zen.
The reason that Go is not a game, is that it do not have clear rules. The only people I know that have practical and deep understanding of Go is John Tromp, who has made some nice Go rules, and Robert Jasiek, who claim to have formalized the Japanese practice into rules.
As for me, I gave up the “game” when I realized it had no true core, and the same goes for Zen.
Massive semantic confusion. Just because the word “Go” is used to denote a family of games and game-like activities doesn’t mean there can’t be concrete realizations of the concept that capture most or all of its interesting qualities. Concluding that the game has “no true core” and giving it up, merely because its label is too broad for your taste, strikes me as very confused thinking.
Giving it up is rational thinking, because there is no “it” there when the label is too broad.
In Bayesian inference, it is equivalent to P( A | B v C v D v …), which is somewhat like underfitting. The space of possibilities becomes too large for it to be possible to find a good move. In games it is precisely the unclear parts of the game space that is interesting to the loosing part, because it is most likely there will be better moves there. But when it is not even possible to analyze those parts, then true optimal play regresses to quarreling about it, which is precisely what the Japanese tradition has done for at least some hundred years.
I have played enough Go to know that the concrete rules can make the endgame very different. The usual practice is to pretend it is not so, and stop the game before the endgame starts.
So Go is riddled with quarrels and pretense. Not a game in practice. More like politics, or Zen.
Optimal playing strategies in games can be very different from what people believe them to be, as examplified by the program Eurisko which won the Traveller TCS championships with very unconventional fleets. I suspect strongly that similar thing will happen for true Go games.
I might have found a variation of minimax that can tackle Go, but to use it, it MUST be possible to evaluate a Go position, at least in principle. So I will probably go for the Tromp-Taylor rules, if I get the time to do this. And perhaps the Japanese rules of Robert Jasiek.
The rules of Go are perfectly clear. It’s the consequences of those rules that we have a great deal of trouble understanding.
Or that you do, at least.
You are wrong. Here are some links showing that Go is not perfectly clear:
Introduction:
Discussion of a lot of problems with scoring:
Some concrete positional examples:
The rules of chess don’t explicitly state whether the vast majority of moves are good ideas or bad ones. (Exceptions involve moves that would put your king in check—and that’s not bad, it’s disallowed.)
You can know all of the rules, and not be able to determine how you should react in a chess game. Because all of the principles that govern ‘good’ play arise as consequences from the explicit rules.
If proper moves were as easy to determine in chess as they were in Tic-Tac-Toe, no one would bother playing it.
Go is the same, only more so.