Why programmers should play Go

http://railspikes.com/2008/7/14/why-programmers-should-play-go

by jon_dahl • 18 years ago

48 51 18 years ago

go is much more interesting than chess. chess is a battle to the death, in go you can have entire games without a single capture, and win by a point or two.

cglee2• 18 years ago

In chess you could have a checkmate without a single capture. Fool's mate, right?

prospero5• 18 years ago

Few stones being captured is usually a sign of skillful players. I don't think the same can be said of fool's mate.

hugh• 18 years ago

Do you think that the fact that you can have entire games without a single capture, and win by a point or two makes it a more interesting game, or are those two unrelated thoughts?

Leon• 18 years ago

It's probably a side effect of being a more interesting game, whatever that means to be more interesting, at least.

prospero5• 18 years ago

There's an interesting trend in the computer go community away from rule-based AI, and towards a more stochastic approach. This means that where the leading developers were all 1 dan or better (very talented amateurs, by the metric of the article), it's become possible for talented programmers with a relatively limited understanding of the game to make major contributions.

Go is a complicated game, and the human response to that is to create rules of thumb and build a strong intuitive understandings of different positions. It's arguably less elegant to analyze a position by running hundreds of thousands of playouts, but it's finally a problem that resembles real computer science (though most academic papers are still of the "we tried this, and it did okay" form). It's a pretty exciting time to be involved, and I'd suggest that anyone with even a passing curiosity check it out.

schtog• 18 years ago

Yes chess isn't really interesting out of an AI-perspective since a supercomputer can beat a human with brute force + heuristics. In Go you'd need something more like real AI.

geebee2• 18 years ago

Chess could be interesting from an AI perspective if you limited the amount of brute force searching allowed. Computer chess and human chess are, by and large, completely different games.

I'm not sure I agree with this article about patterns in chess. The real masters think strategically as well as tactically, and use the structure of the pawns and pieces, combined with intuition, to guide their moves.

Ultimately, I suspect that go and chess fire up similar regions of the human brain.

prospero5• 18 years ago

AI is search, brute-force or otherwise. There are a number of fascinating things that have come out of chess research on the way to grandmaster-level play, and even if the strongest chess players are all computers, that doesn't mean that it's suddenly become a worthless pursuit. The day that a perfect game of chess is played is the day that it gets boring, not before.

With respect to go, the current approach is completely brute force; it plays thousands of games at random, and uses the percentage of wins by one side to evaluate the strength of the position. The challenge is how to use the information you've already encountered in your searches to reduce the search-space to something manageable.

Alex39172• 18 years ago

The archives of this mailing list has some good discussions about the stochastic approach:

http://computer-go.org/pipermail/computer-go/

Apparently the strongest computer AI is now able to beat 1k players consistently.

prospero5• 18 years ago

It's worth noting that it can beat 1k players on a 9x9 board. On a 19x19 board (the standard board size), they are both weaker and less consistent.

Alex39172• 18 years ago

If anyone wants to play me, I'm Alex3917 on KGS. I'm still a beginner though, only 12kyu.

http://www.gokgs.com/

Also, if you want a good introduction to the game, check out this K5 article:

http://www.kuro5hin.org/story/2002/7/11/62356/9269

nazgulnarsil3• 18 years ago

added you as a friend. I'm 12k as well, though I have a lot of variance in my skill level.

dood6• 18 years ago

I've kept out of KGS for a long time since it was just too tempting, but this post has inspired me to get back into action. I'll also be looking out for other HN readers, username d00d.

cglee2• 18 years ago

Very nice. This reminds me of that "groups" feature request for HN...

DavidSJ• 18 years ago

That was the article that got me into Go in 2002. I list in and some other recommended Go resources here: http://www.davidsj.com/post.php?id=A72_0_1_0_C

dan-kruchinin• 18 years ago

thanks! Great collection of links.

mattmaroon9• 18 years ago

I generally advise people to play games that involve some randomness, like poker, gin, or backgammon, before moving on to games without. The reason being that almost all of life involves decision making in situations with some random factor, and humans are ill-equipped by biology for this. Most decisions that don't involve some unknown are relatively easy.

Go might be better for programming specifically (since randomness isn't a factor) but programming is a subset of life.

brent3• 18 years ago

> Most decisions that don't involve some unknown are relatively easy.

Apparently you don't play go.

I play games for entertainment, not to mimic reality. Games with chance as a significant component aren't necessarily more entertaining than games requiring significant skill.

mattmaroon9• 18 years ago

I would say the general population disagrees with you, which is why are games of chance a multi-billion dollar industry and only a few people can make a good living playing chess.

ken• 18 years ago

I've never heard anybody complain that Go was too easy.

mattmaroon9• 18 years ago

I meant more decisions in life in general. Go is certainly not easy.

dood6• 18 years ago

There is plenty of unknown in Go.

mattmaroon9• 18 years ago

I must be playing it wrong. I've only played a couple times, but I thought it was a game of complete information. Perhaps I was taught incorrect rules.

whacked_new• 18 years ago

This article is irritatingly full of stretches.

Go proverbs? Are there not chess proverbs? Similar can be said about managing companies and reading Sun Tsu's Art of War. You can extend the Art of War to interpersonal relationships. You can find meaning in every sentence in Harry Potter, if you felt like it.

And Go can make you smarter? Go, like chess, involves short term and long term memory manipulation, risk analysis, pattern recognition, psychology, and executive planning, which further involves deception and short-term and long-term planning. While Go has more possible configurations than Chess, the feeble human mind will not be using some drastically different skillset to deal with it. That is to say, I doubt children who play Chess are worse off than those who play Go. Ergo, it's not Go: it's just the training of relevant skills, which is a byproduct of learning the game.

Pardon my bluntness, but this reads like those articles that try to make something more mystical than it really is.

jon_dahl3• 18 years ago

I think that most of what I said about Go could also apply to chess. I just have less experience with chess than with Go.

dood6• 18 years ago

The post gives a reasonable overview of why programmers may benefit from playing Go, but there is a whole lot more that could be said. Though I've not yet mastered either pursuit, I'll struggle to put some of my thoughts into words:

Go is particularly suited as an exercise for the programmer's mind because both activities share some quite specific and fundamental cognitive skills, which people generally don't have unless they train.

The overwhelming complexity of Go demands a specific and subtle mindset, which is very much applicable to programming; relaxed yet focused, careful but creative.

Both practise mentally modelling, analysing, and manipulating a complex, evolving system, requiring frequent decisions which may have far reaching and unpredictable effects, which must balance immediate needs and possible outcomes.

Go trains a holistic way of thinking, which is unusual to the average reductionist mind, requiring an integrative understanding of a system as composed of interrelating parts, and as a whole.

jon_dahl3• 18 years ago

Good thoughts - I too have a lot to learn with both Go and programming, and I know there's a lot more going on (with each) than in my original post.

TweedHeads• 18 years ago

Anywhere to play GO in Flash or SVG against a computer in different levels?

The only one I found is Yahoo Games but that one sucks and it doesn't have single player.

eru3• 18 years ago

Why do you want to play against a computer?

Did SVG became Turing complete?

foobar2k2• 18 years ago

I first heard of Go when the film Pi came out: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%CE%A0_(film)#The_game_of_Go

It has conjured up visions of crazy hackers ever since.

foobar2k2• 18 years ago

Bug in the URL parser?

Why programmers should play Go

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