The game of Go originated in China more than 2,500 years ago.
Confucius wrote about the game, and it is considered one of the four essential arts required of any true Chinese scholar.
Played by more than 40 million people worldwide, the rules of the game are simple.
Players take turns to place black or white stones on a board, trying to capture the opponent’s stones or surround empty space to make points of territory.
The game is played primarily through intuition and feel and because of its beauty, subtlety and intellectual depth, it has captured the human imagination for centuries.
The game of Go (pictured) originated in China more than 2,500 years ago. Confucius wrote about the game, and it is considered one of the four essential arts required of any true Chinese scholar
But as simple as the rules are, Go is a game of profound complexity.
There are 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,
000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible positions – that’s more than the number of atoms in the universe, and more than a googol (10 to the power of 100) times larger than chess.
This complexity is what makes Go hard for computers to play and therefore an irresistible challenge to artificial intelligence researchers, who use games as a testing ground to invent smart, flexible algorithms that can tackle problems, sometimes in ways similar to humans.
In the game, two players take turns to place black or white stones on a square grid, with the goal being to dominate the board by surrounding the opponent’s pieces
