So this weekend I downloaded Goban, a freeware Go game for Mac OS X. (It's a sweet piece of public-domain software, by the way.)
Having never played Go in my life, I read up on the basic rules and gave it a try--needless to say, the computer toyed with me for a bit before it ceased to be amused by my 1-ply strategies, and then it proceeded to break me like Ivan Drago.
It's the height of understatement to say this about a game as old as this, but I was really amazed by the way in which Go takes a simple set of rules that you can grasp in ten minutes and uses them to generate what appears to me to be limitless strategic depth. So I'm going to try to start reading up on the game (I found a pretty cool site, the Sensei's Library, that has a lot of good information). But how did you get into the game (if you've played it)? What are the best things for a beginner to do in order to improve one's skill? Are there any particular books that are worth reading that have beginning theory? If you're intimately familiar with chess and its strategies (which I am, at least compared to the casual player), are there any skills from that game that carry over?
Having never played Go in my life, I read up on the basic rules and gave it a try--needless to say, the computer toyed with me for a bit before it ceased to be amused by my 1-ply strategies, and then it proceeded to break me like Ivan Drago.
It's the height of understatement to say this about a game as old as this, but I was really amazed by the way in which Go takes a simple set of rules that you can grasp in ten minutes and uses them to generate what appears to me to be limitless strategic depth. So I'm going to try to start reading up on the game (I found a pretty cool site, the Sensei's Library, that has a lot of good information). But how did you get into the game (if you've played it)? What are the best things for a beginner to do in order to improve one's skill? Are there any particular books that are worth reading that have beginning theory? If you're intimately familiar with chess and its strategies (which I am, at least compared to the casual player), are there any skills from that game that carry over?
It's one of the best shows ever made for sure.