I’ve been meaning to learn the game of “Go” (weiqi) for quite a while now, and finally got around to it now that there are some people at Harvard at beginner’s levels to play with.

The usual adage is that the rules of “Go” are simple, but the strategies are difficult. Sometimes they cite the fact that computers can’t play “Go” very well (compared to, say, chess). I’m not in a position to defend or refute this sentiment yet, but I think this stuff is easier than it first appeared to me years ago, if you think about it the right way. “Go” seems a very mathematical game, almost a counting and topological reasoning game. And all the difficulties arise out of the fact that the counting and reasoning is done in 2D (rather than 1D, which would be simple).

So there is this list of terminology like “liberties,” “eyes,” “false eyes,” “alive and dead regions,” etc., but sometimes they greatly confuse the matter, so I found it easier to recast these basic concepts in more general terms.

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