Go/Talk

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Aren't most Go boards not perfect squares? can we add that to the part where we talk about the dimensions? -- mincus

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I have a question regarding the Ko rule: is it not allowed to recreate the previous board position, or is it not allowed to recreate any previous board position?

Also, regarding the 9x9 boards: what happens if strong players play 9x9? Is it always a draw, or does black always win? How do computers fare against human players on a 9x9 board? --AxelBoldt

The ko rule is expressed differently in different rulesets. Japanese rules effectively says "can't recapture the stone immediately", and then has extra rules tacked on to cover things like triple kos. Other rulesets use "superko", which disallows recreating any previous board position. I don't know whether we should be getting into obscure rules differences here.

9x9 boards are quite challenging even to professionals; however, the game is much shorter and tends to be almost entirely tactical instead of strategic.

Computers tend to fare poorly once brute-force searching of the game tree is ineffective, which is the case well below the 9x9 board size. They also need a good position-evaluation algorithm to decide which moves to explore, which is proving very difficult to discover. -- Bignose

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The distinction between each rank is, by definition, one handicap stone. In other words, the difference in rank between two players is theoretically equal to the number of handicap stones required for a balanced game between the players

I am not sure that the second sentence follows from the first; in fact I think it it quite surprising that there be a transitivity as follows: A and B are balanced with 1 handicap stone, B and C are balanced with 1 handicap stone, therefore A and C are balanced with two handicap stones. Is it actually true?

Also, is there any formalized way to proceed to the next rank, or do you rank yourself? --AxelBoldt