robtex said:
tell us about chess and go...i have no knowledge of it ...be nice to see it through your experienced eyes
Well, I wouldn't consider myself "experienced" lol. In go, my skills are far below average, mainly from a lack of competition. In chess, my skills are on the low end of the average scale. In fact, I know I'd get flattened by an experienced person in the former (I have trouble with computers), and in chess I have been flattened many a time.
Both games are games of strategy, though I'm sure almost everybody knows chess is a strategy game. Go, though, is the more complicated strategy game. It focuses more on intuition than rote calculation. Chess, though, is more of a tactics game. It's far easier to take the whole board into consideration with chess, so it lends itself better to calculation (they both do take them).
In chess (international chess, as there are several variaties), you control sixteen pieces composed of eight pawns, two rooks, two bishops, two knights, a king, and a queen. Each piece moves in a different fashion. The game is played on a checkerboard (not normally red and black, though). The goal is to put the enemy king in such danger than he cannot avoid capture. Players are denoted by colors, white and black respectively for players one and two.
In go, your goal is to surround as much territory as possible. You do this by placing stones on the board, and like chess they are divided into black and white pieces. The board is made of intersecting lines, and comes in three sizes 9x9, 13x13, and 19x19. You place a stone on an intersecting line, from which it is never moved unless killed. Killing is accomplished by completely surrounding a stone or group along horizontal and vertical lines.
Naturally, both of these are very complex (computers can't yet match competent go players...which tells you where I stand lol). You can seek to accomplish something, but it is normally dependent on your opponents counter-responses. So, I must anticipate my opponent *and* have a grasp of the game's dynamics if I am to acheive victory.
It is further complicated, because my chain of moves are actually interdependant and often must proceed in chronological order...which also means I have to
force my opponent to cooperate.
As a result, the only way to win the game is to perceive it. In neither game can a human win by rote calculation. So, we see "moves ahead," but this is nothing of the sort unless we are just sitting there trying to calculate, and don't get me wrong, we do have to do that.
However, seeing moves ahead is more often looking at the board and instantly perceiving what it will be like in three or four moves. You just look at the board and know. It's not something you can readily explain. You just do it. When I see somebody put a go stone in one of my corners on a 3x3 mark, I know how the fight will basically turn out, and it isn't hard to be right on that one.
Now there is the careful checking of the board to make sure your perceptions are right, but the checking of the board isn't what gives the moves. It's the perception. If someone needs to rely solely on calculation, then they just learned.
I hope that explains it some
. I know it may be more confusing now than before.
