The Go Challenge - Part I

This post is part of an ongoing series that follows my attempt to get better at the board game Go.

Shortly after the beginning of my senior year of highschool, I became interested in Go (also known as Weiqi and Baduk). I sold a few of my things in order to afford to buy a Go board with stones. The board that I had bought was a standard Japanese sized spruce board (1" thick) with a set of bi-convex Marble stones in wooden bowls.

I unfortunately didn’t realize that very few of my friends were interested in the board game. This left me forced to play on the online Go Server called KGS under pseudonyms (usually some silly name). Of course, I quickly lost interest in playing people that I barely knew. This phase lasted a short two months before I moved onto another game.

When I first came to the university, I tried playing at the local Go club a few times but never got hooked into it again. I am now nearing the end of my second year here at the university and have renewed interest in the game after reading a paper on the complexity of Go [link]. I’ll be playing the game with the goal of achieving a rank of 1-dan amateur (with an aspiration to later work on a Go Bot). I do know that this isn’t a trivial task to complete and am fairly confident that I can atleast make 5 kyu with practice (no idea about after that).

I currently have the following 3 books to help me improve my play,

• Go for Beginners by Kaoru Iwamoto
• Go - A Complete Introduction to the Game by Cho Chikun
• Graded Go Problems Vol.1 by Kano Yoshinori

I will be mainly playing on KGS since I am used to the interface and know a few channels to hang out in. Other sites that I have used in the past and will continue to use are goproblems and sensei’s library. If you have any book or site to reccommend, feel free to either contact me via email or in the comments below =D.

I will leave you all with the replay of a famous Go game,