> If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go
I think that's why I don't like chess. It seems to me that a winning strategy would be to think as far ahead as possible by enumerating all the permutations. A few heuristics exist however.
The neat thing about Go is that, whilst the winning strategy is exactly to think ahead and enumerate all possible positions, to do so is impossible. (Even the superhuman AI fudge it. They can just read farther ahead than humans.)
So to do well you have to learn how to support your reading ahead with heuristics and a feel for the game.
A famous amateur player and advocate for the game once went through all the game records of Go Seigen in order to digitize them. This means having to pore over hand-written diagrams looking for the next number in the sequence of moves. Obviously this is easier if you can guess where to look. But, if you guess them all correctly, then you are playing just as well as the old master! After spending a good few months on the task, he was a significantly better player!
> A famous amateur player and advocate for the game once went through all the game records of Go Seigen in order to digitize them. This means having to pore over hand-written diagrams looking for the next number in the sequence of moves. Obviously this is easier if you can guess where to look. But, if you guess them all correctly, then you are playing just as well as the old master! After spending a good few months on the task, he was a significantly better player!
I'd never heard of this!! Who're you talking about?
Nice. As systems become more and more complicated (like real world itself) it is no longer feasible to enumerate all permutations but rather get a feel for the patterns - an intuition. A skilled intuiter (?) would know the subtle ways in which patterns emerge.
FWIW this isn't a path to success in chess, at least not for a human. There's something like 31 average moves per position in chess. So calculating just 5 moves deep would be 31^10 or about 820 billion positions. In fact even just 2 moves deep would be 31^4 = about a million positions. I'm a relatively strong player and ballparking my speed by playing through the famous Morphy opera house game in my mind - I'm hitting around 2-3 positions per second, in a game I know intimately.
Progress in chess (and I assume Go) is about training your subconscious so that your mind naturally pushes you in the right direction with minimal effort. Think about something like writing. When you're writing something you aren't really thinking through each word in your vocabulary, comparing them, and picking one - it all just kind of flows without you even trying. The same thing happens with chess mastery.
This is why some people say you're not "really" playing chess before a rather high rating. Less experienced players will struggle to simply not leave material hanging. Then as they improve that will no longer be an issue but then they'll still struggle to avoid simple tactical ideas. But once you move comfortably beyond that phase, the game becomes much more about the things people want it to be about - strategy, plans, big picture stuff that's lots of fun. It's one of the way the game draws you in - it gets more and more addictive, and rewarding, the better you become at it!
> If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go
If you think this is equivalent to the description in GP then you are quite simply incorrect.
If you think it's just the actual reason you personally don't like chess, then I'm not sure why you asked in the first place; of course go is an "abstract total information strategy board game".
Yes, in principle such a game has such an algorithm for perfect play. In practice, computers cannot and do not do that for chess (although they make a reasonable approximation) and approach go quite differently (in much the same way that earlier attempts at computer chess did, before Deep Blue's much more brute-force approach proved effective given enough computing power). Getting AI for go to its current superhuman level involved multiple complete revolutions in how the systems were programmed.
I don't like chess, but like go. Go feels way more free form. In chess it feels like every move has been played already and has a name. I feel like I need to study up on all of it. In go there's so many possibilities, I just play something interesting and see where it takes me.
Honestly just give it a go. :)
I like go and don't like chess, for the simple reason that getting good at chess requires a lot of memorization, while getting good at go doesn't. Having lots of openings and positions memorized to know the best moves automatically is not something that I personally find fun.
In go there are some sequences of "standard" moves (joseki) but it's highly controversial whether memorizing them even helps at all, see another thread in this same comments section.
Opening knowledge in chess is almost entirely unnecessary below a rather high level, perhaps 2200+.
The reason less experienced players get obsessed with openings is because they make regular tactical mistakes in the opening, and then blame lack of opening knowledge, as opposed to their lack of tactical ability. In other words they try to memorize their way out of tactical mistakes, which is impossible. At that point, after it inevitably fails to work, they claim they've plateaued, lack the IQ, maybe the memory, maybe are too old, or whatever other excuse.
This is made even worse by the fact that opening knowledge is ostensibly easy to improve whereas tactical vision seems very difficult to improve. In reality it's the exact opposite. Exact opening lines will fade from your mind rapidly (though general ideas will stay with you forever - but that's another topic), whereas grinding tactics might not 'feel' like you've learned anything, but overtime will permanently train your intuition to where it needs to be to start seeing major gains.
On top of all of this - one could simply play 'freestyle' chess (the starting pieces locations are randomized) and suddenly there is 0 opening theory. But you'll find that your freestyle rating is going to be strongly proportional to your 'normal' chess rating!
I think it's imprecise to say that opening knowledge is unnecessary. What is unnecessary is opening theory, or more specifically, rote memorisation of opening lines.
This is different from opening understanding. Understanding the importance of tempo, development, controlling the centre, the different pawn structures, middle games and endgames that result from different openings, the plans and motifs typical in various opening complexes. Any late beginner to intermediate player needs to pick and study an opening. The problem is that instead of studying the opening, players try to memorise lines without improving their understanding of the resulting middlegames, and the plans they should be playing for. Then, when their opponent diverges from the main lines(which in my experience happens in 99% of games between players below 2000, because it's very rare that both players have memorised the same long line), they don't know what to do.
I'm a 1900 FIDE player, I have an opening repertoire of sorts. For instance I play the modern benoni with black. An extremely theoretical opening, and yet I have only a small handful of longer lines actually memorised, because they're simply too complex for me to figure out over the board(e.g the b5 lines against Bd3 h3 Nf3 setups). But what I have studied extensively is the strategic landscape of the benoni, games by strong players in the opening, etc. And I have years of experience playing the opening. I know what kind of exchanges typically favour me, or my opponent, what pawn breaks each player should be trying for. And all of that knowledge is crucial for me to get anything out of the opening. I have beaten players tactically much stronger than me in this opening simply because my understanding of this specific opening was better than theirs.
Tactical ability is obviously important, but it's definitely not everything.
In general I certainly wouldn't disagree with this, it's what I was alluding to with general ideas that stick with you. But I'd call this a different thing than opening study. For instance one can get Benoni like structures in the King's Indian, Benko, English, Nimzo, and more! And so it's not really understanding the opening, but understanding how to play a certain structure that arises in many different openings.
And it has nothing to do with memorization. I mean you mentioned the b5 stuff against Bd3/h3/Nf3 setups. You might not be able to calculate the depth of what happens if white manages to hold onto his extra pawn, but you can certainly calculate to at least the point of 'okay, I'm getting my pawn back in most lines, disrupting his center, and getting my play going. if the one line where he holds onto it (Bxb5 stuff) then he's going to have a bit of difficulty castling, his pieces look disorganized, his extra pawn and b2 both look weak.' That's more than enough on general principles to go for the sac I think.
Only one way to find out.
If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go. If you dislike chess because
- it has too many rules,
- the board is too smalll,
- the pieces move around too much, or
- it doesn't involve adversarial, collaborative construction,
or any of the other things that make go different from chess, you have a chance of liking go.
> If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go
I think that's why I don't like chess. It seems to me that a winning strategy would be to think as far ahead as possible by enumerating all the permutations. A few heuristics exist however.
The neat thing about Go is that, whilst the winning strategy is exactly to think ahead and enumerate all possible positions, to do so is impossible. (Even the superhuman AI fudge it. They can just read farther ahead than humans.)
So to do well you have to learn how to support your reading ahead with heuristics and a feel for the game.
A famous amateur player and advocate for the game once went through all the game records of Go Seigen in order to digitize them. This means having to pore over hand-written diagrams looking for the next number in the sequence of moves. Obviously this is easier if you can guess where to look. But, if you guess them all correctly, then you are playing just as well as the old master! After spending a good few months on the task, he was a significantly better player!
> A famous amateur player and advocate for the game once went through all the game records of Go Seigen in order to digitize them. This means having to pore over hand-written diagrams looking for the next number in the sequence of moves. Obviously this is easier if you can guess where to look. But, if you guess them all correctly, then you are playing just as well as the old master! After spending a good few months on the task, he was a significantly better player!
I'd never heard of this!! Who're you talking about?
Nice. As systems become more and more complicated (like real world itself) it is no longer feasible to enumerate all permutations but rather get a feel for the patterns - an intuition. A skilled intuiter (?) would know the subtle ways in which patterns emerge.
FWIW this isn't a path to success in chess, at least not for a human. There's something like 31 average moves per position in chess. So calculating just 5 moves deep would be 31^10 or about 820 billion positions. In fact even just 2 moves deep would be 31^4 = about a million positions. I'm a relatively strong player and ballparking my speed by playing through the famous Morphy opera house game in my mind - I'm hitting around 2-3 positions per second, in a game I know intimately.
Progress in chess (and I assume Go) is about training your subconscious so that your mind naturally pushes you in the right direction with minimal effort. Think about something like writing. When you're writing something you aren't really thinking through each word in your vocabulary, comparing them, and picking one - it all just kind of flows without you even trying. The same thing happens with chess mastery.
This is why some people say you're not "really" playing chess before a rather high rating. Less experienced players will struggle to simply not leave material hanging. Then as they improve that will no longer be an issue but then they'll still struggle to avoid simple tactical ideas. But once you move comfortably beyond that phase, the game becomes much more about the things people want it to be about - strategy, plans, big picture stuff that's lots of fun. It's one of the way the game draws you in - it gets more and more addictive, and rewarding, the better you become at it!
> If you dislike chess because you don't like abstract total information strategy board games you will not like go
If you think this is equivalent to the description in GP then you are quite simply incorrect.
If you think it's just the actual reason you personally don't like chess, then I'm not sure why you asked in the first place; of course go is an "abstract total information strategy board game".
Yes, in principle such a game has such an algorithm for perfect play. In practice, computers cannot and do not do that for chess (although they make a reasonable approximation) and approach go quite differently (in much the same way that earlier attempts at computer chess did, before Deep Blue's much more brute-force approach proved effective given enough computing power). Getting AI for go to its current superhuman level involved multiple complete revolutions in how the systems were programmed.
Even Connect Four wasn't strongly solved until 1995, and checkers is only weakly solved and that not until 2007 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solved_game).
I don't like chess, but like go. Go feels way more free form. In chess it feels like every move has been played already and has a name. I feel like I need to study up on all of it. In go there's so many possibilities, I just play something interesting and see where it takes me. Honestly just give it a go. :)
I like go and don't like chess, for the simple reason that getting good at chess requires a lot of memorization, while getting good at go doesn't. Having lots of openings and positions memorized to know the best moves automatically is not something that I personally find fun.
In go there are some sequences of "standard" moves (joseki) but it's highly controversial whether memorizing them even helps at all, see another thread in this same comments section.
Opening knowledge in chess is almost entirely unnecessary below a rather high level, perhaps 2200+.
The reason less experienced players get obsessed with openings is because they make regular tactical mistakes in the opening, and then blame lack of opening knowledge, as opposed to their lack of tactical ability. In other words they try to memorize their way out of tactical mistakes, which is impossible. At that point, after it inevitably fails to work, they claim they've plateaued, lack the IQ, maybe the memory, maybe are too old, or whatever other excuse.
This is made even worse by the fact that opening knowledge is ostensibly easy to improve whereas tactical vision seems very difficult to improve. In reality it's the exact opposite. Exact opening lines will fade from your mind rapidly (though general ideas will stay with you forever - but that's another topic), whereas grinding tactics might not 'feel' like you've learned anything, but overtime will permanently train your intuition to where it needs to be to start seeing major gains.
On top of all of this - one could simply play 'freestyle' chess (the starting pieces locations are randomized) and suddenly there is 0 opening theory. But you'll find that your freestyle rating is going to be strongly proportional to your 'normal' chess rating!
I think it's imprecise to say that opening knowledge is unnecessary. What is unnecessary is opening theory, or more specifically, rote memorisation of opening lines.
This is different from opening understanding. Understanding the importance of tempo, development, controlling the centre, the different pawn structures, middle games and endgames that result from different openings, the plans and motifs typical in various opening complexes. Any late beginner to intermediate player needs to pick and study an opening. The problem is that instead of studying the opening, players try to memorise lines without improving their understanding of the resulting middlegames, and the plans they should be playing for. Then, when their opponent diverges from the main lines(which in my experience happens in 99% of games between players below 2000, because it's very rare that both players have memorised the same long line), they don't know what to do.
I'm a 1900 FIDE player, I have an opening repertoire of sorts. For instance I play the modern benoni with black. An extremely theoretical opening, and yet I have only a small handful of longer lines actually memorised, because they're simply too complex for me to figure out over the board(e.g the b5 lines against Bd3 h3 Nf3 setups). But what I have studied extensively is the strategic landscape of the benoni, games by strong players in the opening, etc. And I have years of experience playing the opening. I know what kind of exchanges typically favour me, or my opponent, what pawn breaks each player should be trying for. And all of that knowledge is crucial for me to get anything out of the opening. I have beaten players tactically much stronger than me in this opening simply because my understanding of this specific opening was better than theirs.
Tactical ability is obviously important, but it's definitely not everything.
In general I certainly wouldn't disagree with this, it's what I was alluding to with general ideas that stick with you. But I'd call this a different thing than opening study. For instance one can get Benoni like structures in the King's Indian, Benko, English, Nimzo, and more! And so it's not really understanding the opening, but understanding how to play a certain structure that arises in many different openings.
And it has nothing to do with memorization. I mean you mentioned the b5 stuff against Bd3/h3/Nf3 setups. You might not be able to calculate the depth of what happens if white manages to hold onto his extra pawn, but you can certainly calculate to at least the point of 'okay, I'm getting my pawn back in most lines, disrupting his center, and getting my play going. if the one line where he holds onto it (Bxb5 stuff) then he's going to have a bit of difficulty castling, his pieces look disorganized, his extra pawn and b2 both look weak.' That's more than enough on general principles to go for the sac I think.
Chess has memorization; go has counting. Go endgames especially require a lot of counting. I don't think either skill is particularly fun.