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Anyone here play? It is pretty much the ultimate boardgame. Its like game-theory the game. From the very start you are embroiled in interesting risk/reward and provoking you opponent to overextending type stuff. Great place to play is gokgs.com I actually cant play many strategy games anymore because I realize this is like go with a load of crap thrown on it. My friend and I call this 'false complexity' the game isnt really complex it just has loads of rules and random stuff to familiarise yourself with before getting into the game proper. Its not a great a comparison but I would say something like magic the gathering or Dota would be good contenders for most 'false complexity' attained in a game.

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In Dota for example the false complexity is what allows someone with not so great analytical thinking but great knowledge of the complexity (items and hero combinations) to fare pretty well. It helps level the field. Although comparing go to RTS is extremely misleading. RTS's have pretty deep of what I call 'continuous tactics' where you need to plan an optimal control of your character with a continuum rather than discrete set of plays. It presents incredibly rich situations which you cannot explain with the kind of strategy you see in go or chess, for instance. The same goes for games like counter-strike, once you take into account limited aiming capability. I think it's beautiful how those games can hide this richness into a very fun game at low levels, and how they don't seem so hard just because we're so good at spatial reasoning and planning.

Here's an illustration:

http://youtu.be/5e8HZqF3cyk?t=2m1s

I also like this quote by von Neumann:

"If people do not believe that mathematics is simple, it is only because they do not realize how complicated life is."

I confess I do wonder what would be the equivalent 'go of RTS games', where the minimal, essential dynamics are captured without all the bling.

I didn't get the counter strike example. It is an example of a non-obvious mechanic, but I didn't see where the "rich strategy" was coming from.

In a single round, perhaps not. In a best of 30 rounds on three different maps with asymmetrical teams and a team economy, you can see the elements of what the original comment was talking about, "interesting risk/reward and provoking you opponent to overextending type stuff."

If you haven't seen a Counter-Strike game played competitively, this weekend a "Major" tournament is being played in Katowice[0]. It's well worth watching a match to get a glimpse of the mechanics. It might also be fun.

[0] http://www.esl-one.com/csgo/katowice-2015/

> 'continuous tactics'

I think the words you're looking for are "micromanagement" (if it's about dealing with more than one unit) and "mechanical skill" if it's about having twitch reaction times (for last hitting, landing spell-combos, etc.)

I play DotA on and off, and thi is the part that irritates me the most :x

Twitch reactions are what make it real-time. You might be more interested in a turn-based strategy game where you can plan out your moves before striking.

For a number of years, the common belief was that RTS Go = Starcraft Broodwar, especially in Asia.

You can maintain this belief until today if you measure "minimality/essentiality" by size (in MB).

Most probably there are other games out there that are even more minimalistic but for sure they're less popular and less known. You could make a case for DF (although there is no MP) or even C&C1 (just ignore the balance issues).

I'm not sure that kind of mechanical parts level the field. I'm terribly bad at learning repeatable, dumb, tasks - like checking your base at the beginning of SC2 for stray drones. For me, it's the lamest gameplay decision not to have the base fully covered with visibility at the beginning. It favors a different kind of player.

I'm playing a lot of CoH because it cuts all the base building ceremony down to minimum.

It doesn't have the richness of Go but I believe https://www.gnu.org/software/liquidwar6/ captures the essence of the "action/micro" side of RTSs.

I prefer the old http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5 .

I'm not super familiar with Dota, but I have thought a fair amount about game theory as it applies to RTS games, and Dota (being a MOBA) has many similarities.

The main thing (from a game theoretical standpoint) that I believe sets RTS games apart from (most) strategy board games is not the real-time nature, but the fact that RTS games are not perfect information games.

Incorporating knowledge about your opponent's playing style is important in chess (and I presume Go), but I believe it is vastly more important in RTS games, so much so that in high-level competitive games it is a primary driver of both players' decisions in the game.

Of course, from a broader (not game theoretical) standpoint, the bigger and more obvious difference between strategy board games and RTS games is that the latter, being real-time, requires substantial physical speed and coordination, which is mostly not the case with the former.

Well go is often played online with a very tight time limit. Giving only a matter of seconds for each move. I wouldbt say its a matter of coordination, but, pattern recognition from noisy jumbled data at speed.

I play and love both Go and MtG, and I think your assessment of MtG is not fair. The thing about MtG is that the real fun is not as much in playing the game itself but in the deck building. When I'm playing a game of MtG, I'm not thinking only about the current game or how to win it, but rather which cards/combos are working well, which are not working, what cards I should use instead, etc. to improve my deck for the next game.

Finding interesting combos among the thousands of existing MtG cards is also very fun and cannot be done in a minimalistic game with a very small number of components like Go. They are just games with different goals and scopes.

What I dislike about the evolution of MtG is the placeholder words that they constantly add to the rules, e.g. "lifelink" for "damage dealt by this creature also causes you to gain that much life". Cards with that ability existed before the word was introduced, so the word is unnecessary, it just makes the text of the cards shorter... but the constant extensions of the vocabulary make the rules harder to understand and remember. The actual rules are still mostly like in the nineties... in fact most, if not all, of the actual rule changes have been simplifications rather than complications (mana burn removed, meh). But they just like to make up unnecessary words, it's a pity.

A lot of the "false complexity" in MtG comes from the wide variety of trivial differences between cards. Deckbuilding becomes an exercise in, depending on format, sifting through some 10,000 (probably more by now) cards to determine which are synergistic.

I wish they would strip out the trivially different cards, particularly the ones that are strictly better or worse than another, such as two identical cards but one has a higher cost for no reason.

Some of the cruft is due to rebalancing as the game evolved, but some is just part of the artificial scarcity model of making many of the common cards worse than the best rare ones.

I agree, though, that MtG has a very broad and creative tree of possibilities. In the pure board game world, it is perhaps more similar to Arimaa.

But, but... sifting through 10,000 cards to determine which are synergistic is half of the fun!

I really love the feeling of seeing an interesting card in a new expansion, and thinking that it might go well with some obscure card that you remember from some obscure expansion from 15 years ago. And researching what that card actually did. It really feels like being a wizard and going to an ancient forgotten grimoire to see if you can find a use from a long-forgotten spell. I especially enjoy realizing that a card that was considered universally crappy and never saw serious use is suddenly useful.

I agree that the cards that are strictly worse than others could have been avoided. But they don't really do that much anymore (they seldom release commons that do nothing like Hill Giant or Grizzly Bear, for example). And they can still be fun in formats like Type III, or Limited as new players call it.

> "What I dislike about the evolution of MtG is the placeholder words that they constantly add to the rules"

This is an odd criticism. It's the essence of DRY applied to a context with very limited space (the physical surface of the card). Would you really prefer to have something like this written out in 2pt font?

http://magiccards.info/bng/en/144.html

Having a named mechanic also enables rulings to apply to it, rather than just to individual cards with a particular wording. The keywords they introduce do create a learning curve for new players, but this is Magic we're talking about--not exactly a game for people afraid of learning curves.

I never said false complex game werent fun! :) Go can be make you feel bad. Because it is so completely based on skill and judgement, the better player will invariably annihilate the worse one. So you either get annihilated and feel stupid, or annihilate your opponent and feel sadistic. Though a certain percentage of the time you have very close match which is really amazing.

I love Go. But from a game-theoretic view it is theoretically rather trivial, as are chess, checkers, and any other game in which players with perfect information alternate moves.

The winner of a Go game is whoever more reliably predicts the ultimate result of various potential intermediate positions. The only interesting game theoretic aspects at all arise to the extent one can predict one's opponents' likely errors, or that one "knows what one doesn't know" in terms of one's own calculating ability.

Actually, go has some deep complexity that chess and checkers do not have, primarily from the idea of "ko".

Read "Mathematical Go".

https://math.berkeley.edu/~berlek/cgt/gobook.html

His point wasn't concerning the complexity, but rather the fact that both players have perfect information about the state of the game.

Interestingly, that book has a review quote by Ken Thompson. I always wondered if the naming of Go(lang) was related to the game ...

Actually, it's interesting in the sense of combinatorial game theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Combinatorial_game_theory) not the branch of decision theory for interactive rational agents known as game theory (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_theory). Two only very distantly related subjects which unfortunately have confusingly similar names.

Sorry, did you mean to write "rational rational agents"? If so, why repeat "rational"?

Nope, it was a typo; I edited my phrasing a couple of times, and the last edit left two copies of the word. Fixed, thanks.

Got it. That said, I use "game theory" in the sense in which it's defined, not least because my thesis was in the subject. :)

Yes, that is the meaning of plain old "game theory", and I also think that's the meaning that the person you were replying to meant; I just wanted to point out that there is something with "game theory" in its name which is much more applicable to Go.

(I do. If anyone's interested, I made a little site you can play a casual game of Go; no complexity to getting started, since play is by email correspondence:

http://go.davepeck.org/

The sources are at https://github.com/davepeck/game-of-go under the MIT license -- I have a long list of things I'd love to work on if I could find the time.)

Cool, thanks for providing the option to change the board size. A good way to start is to play short games on a 9x9 board (19x19 is the official size, but games take a very long time to play out at that massive size). Just find a friend (or against yourself), and play out a bunch of games as quickly as you can, without overthinking every move. Doing this, you'll discover strategies much quicker on a small board than you could playing out games on large board.

Have you tried any other strategic board games out there? There are a fair few relatively recent games that involve deep strategy that come to mind. Since board games require the players to enforce the rules of the game themselves, there's an intrinsic limit to how complicated the game can be before it becomes tedious.

Terra Mystica and Caylus are two examples that I would mention as having a decent amount of complexity and are deeply strategic games without being too complicated. However, whilst still being considered as strategy games, the mechanics and methods of thinking are very different to those used in Go, so it's difficult to compare them directly.

They also have very little randomness in them, so the players' decisions are much more impactful.

...'false complexity' the game isnt really complex it just has loads of rules and random stuff...

Another term I've seen for this concept is "complication". Then one may speak of simple, complex, or complicated systems. Complexity is (perhaps unexpected) behavior that arises from the interaction of relatively few basic behaviors. Complication comes instead from just heaping more and more crap on top of the existing system.

There is no accounting for taste. Many people appreciate complication more than complexity.

I have played go, but not enough to be any good at it.

What makes complexity "false"? Is it "complexity I don't find interesting"?

I read "false complexity" as "complexity as imposed by a set of rules", as opposes to "complexity as an emergent behavior from very simple rules and interaction". Of course, adding any rule will add more complexity of the former, and probably the latter too. Whether one is more interesting than another is a matter of taste.

Also: arbitrary rules.

Concrete example: castling[0] in chess

[0]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Castling

Reading that article, isn't that what Rich Hickey would call "incidental" (and thus bad) complexity?

I think 'artificial' would be a better word here. For example, in Magic the Gathering, there is a very basic turn structure and set of rules that define the game (draw a card, play some cards, attack, play some more cards, done) that is convoluted by several factors, including an increasingly large dictionary of terms relating to abilities and powers of the cards, and a correspondingly dense set of rules to handle the inevitable complexity of all those things.

For example, creature cards have power and toughness. Simple enough. But then at some point, cards were printed that allowed you to modify those values. Now you have to mentally keep track of the actual state of the card. Then consider what happens when you have two effects like "add two to toughness" and "switch power and toughness" applied at the same time. Which one happens first? Much as in software, each new feature of the game inevitably has interactions with other features that have to be analyzed and handled appropriately.

Going back to the main point, this complexity is 'artificial' because it is not an emergent property of the rules themselves, but rather a consequence of the fact that so many rules have been piled on over time.

I'm not quite sure why the comparison is being made here at all. Go has an incredibly simple rule set and is a game played with perfect information. That such deep complexity emerges from those things is part of what makes the game so beautiful. In Magic, randomness and limited information are integral elements of the game, as are the myriad rules and their interactions. That "so many rules have been piled on over time" is not some sort of accident; it's been the intention from the beginning and it's a huge part of what makes the game fun. It's simply a completely different beast from a game like Go. Labeling one game's complexity "artificial" in some arbitrary manner is not meaningful. What's rather clear is that creating a rigorous mathematical model of Go is fairly straightforward, while doing the same for Magic would seem to be a few orders of magnitude more complex.

(Also, that a creature's power and toughness might change has been part of the game since the very beginning: see Giant Growth.)

The golden rule of Magic is that a card's text trumps all else. In other words, the entire premise of the game is that the rules are malleable.

Been playing for many years (I'm around 5k.) I also enjoy a game of backgammon (I picked it up last August) and still play casual, artificially-complex games with my friends, since they are not big go fans

Curious, what "artificially-complex" games do you play with your friends?

The ones they like, I don't care that much. Lately, Battlestar Galactica and a couple I don't remember the names.

I've been playing for a couple years now. Easily one of the most enjoyable games I've ever played. The amount of complexity that's hidden in something seemingly so simple so really rewarding to me. I've only managed to get to around 14-11k so far, but I'm looking forward to progressing as I get older in life!

Just wanted to add that if you don't regularly have the free-time to commit to a full game of Go, or if you simply prefer to play at a slower pace, you might also check out http://www.dragongoserver.net .

They have a variety of board sizes, game types, and recently added tournaments. The average game will play 2-4 moves per day. I typically have 15-18 games going simultaneously, which overall gives me just enough to do while waiting for dependencies to download or the CI server to run.

One note of caution if you've played on other servers: DGS's rankings are shifted considerably higher than many other online servers (much closer in parity with the professional organizations). More info here: http://senseis.xmp.net/?RankWorldwideComparison

OGS (https://online-go.com/) is pretty good as well. It's web based and supports both correspondence and real time games. It's also pretty close to KGS in terms of features.

Generally the most important move is the first move, a common 'zen' go problem is an empty board with 'black to play to win'.

Komi(compensation given to the second player) is a recent invention(1900s) and has only gone up from 4.5 to the recent 6.5 or 7.5 in some tournaments, and yet black still wins over 50% of professional games. Knowing how much komi should be is equivalent to knowing how to play the best game.

As the board fills up tactics or 'tesuji' becomes increasingly important and many times there is only one correct move, computers have become better at this but they still can struggle over common life and death problems. End game is where computers really shine and can now play better than even the best players. Overall computers have taken a recent dramatic upturn in strength thanks to Monte Carlo probabilistic reasoning and are now within a few stones of professionals.

Seemingly, Go will become as chess is within our life times probably even within the next ten years, it will be another interesting moment in the advance of 'AI', but whether it will reveal anything deeper is an open question to me.

I find Go more interesting than chess because often, especially in the beginning, the analysis is less 'hard' or involves less reading of game tree possibilities but involves more 'soft' concepts like spacing, relative territory, trading territory for influence (whether to play on the third line or the fourth line), and is something more akin to art than science if I were to grasp for a metaphor.

Computers will likely enlarge the 'end game' that is be able to play better and better than humans the last part of the game and eventually play better middle game, and eventually only the opening will be where humans have an advantage until that too is taken by computation.

(I'm about an AGA 6 dan)

> Knowing how much komi should be is equivalent to knowing how to play the best game.

I think komi should be chosen so that black and white stand even chances when humans - not optimal players - play.

I'm about 7k on kgs. I'm at that stage where to get better I reckon I would have to actually study joseki and tsumego. Which seems wrong for a game. I will just keep playing at this level.

Also the rating system (while necessary to find a roughly match) sorta bothers me. I keeps making me want to get a higher rating! Normally I dont care about stuff like that.

In my experience, the gap from 7k to 3k actually is mostly about the sense of the game, rather than skill and technique. To be precise, I don't think reading skill is that much difference, but 3k know better what to read, what constitutes weak or strong group. Joseki definitely isn't an issue well into dan level.

I've been playing on and off for a few years. I got to around 1 dan, and hit a wall because I need to actually study regularly in order to improve now, but I'm too lazy. I've been taking a break and planning on creating some sort of routine for doing tsumego every day and pro game reviews.

I've always loved the way it becomes so complex through such seemingly minimal and simple rules (although superko rule and komi aren't particularly simple rules).

I really enjoy playing go. I found the online platforms burdensome and poor at matching me with beginners of similar experience. For years I've imagined Go bringing the world closer together through a platform that combines use of a physical board with Internet connectivity. Playing in person is so much more gratifying.

if anyone would like to simulate this experience together we can Skype play

>poor at matching me with beginners of similar experience

I don't know what server(s) you tried, but unfortunately quite a few of them have a sandbagger problem at the lower ranks. Also the ranking system itself has its inconveniences. The difference between a 19 kyu and a 16 kyu might be nearly negligible, but the difference between a 3 kyu and a 1 kyu is usually not. Coupled with the fact that it takes servers a few games to get an accurate rank, it often makes for a frustrating experience for beginners.

I like Diplomacy (even no-press) because it adds a kind of complexity that you don't have in Go: multi-party considerations.

Gokgs is a great resource, but it requires a Java browser plugin to play. That's seriously messed up.

yes, love to play, and love to teach. play mostly on KGS (4k), teach in person, whoever will sit still ;)

similarly, i find it hard to play other games because they seem silly by comparison.

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