Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Now, these aren't even close to the complete rules of the game of chess—
there are several other types of pieces and special relationships between
pieces that make up the rules.
By most digital-game standards chess has a small number of rules.
Now let's take a look at the complete rules for Go.
The game is played on a 19 × 19 grid.
The game is played by two players, one of whom plays the white
stones and one of whom plays the black stones.
Players can place one of their stones anywhere on the board, as
long as (1) there isn't already a piece there, (2) their piece wouldn't
be immediately captured, and (3) placing the piece won't restore
the board to its previous state (known as the
ko
rule).
If any number of your adjacent stones are surrounded by the en-
emy's stones, those stones must be removed from the board.
At the end of the game, the player with the most territory and
captures is the winner.
This is actually all of the information you need to play Go. There are a
few other guidelines that you'd need to know to play professionally, but
as you can see Go is a very simple game.
Or is it? While chess is certainly more complex
inherently
, Go is by
far the more complex game in terms of
emergent
complexity. Mathema-
tician Claude Shannon estimated that there are 10
120
possible games of
chess. While that's certainly a
ton
of games, the possibility space of Go
dwarfs that at 2 × 10
170
. Wikipedia says of Go:
It has also been argued to be the most complex of all games, with most
advocates referring to the difficulty in programming the game to be
played by computers and the large number of variations of play. While
the strongest computer chess software has defeated top players (Deep
Blue beat the world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997), the best Go
programs routinely lose to talented children and consistently reach
only the 1-10 kyu range of ranking.
Kyu rank, by the way, is considered beginner to intermediate range, so all
professional Go players can easily and consistently beat the greatest Go
artificial intelligence. This is not just because of the possibility space, but
due to the
meaningful
possibility space of Go.
Not All Possibilities Are Equal
Of course, real-time games played in real space, such as football or ice
hockey, have infinite possibilities in a very literal sense. The question is,
however, how many of these possibilities are meaningful inside the game
