Go

It is now official, I started playing the ancient game of Go, though I got off to a rather slow start. My first 10 games were a fiasco, so if I take the Go proverb that says "Lose your first 50 games as quickly as possible", then I am doing pretty well. One puzzling thing in my start is that my friend Paulo, who introduced me to the game, sort of changed the proverb to lose your 100 games, which sort of indicates how much I suck at the game.



Nevertheless, it seems like a fun game to play (regardless of my losing streak), and I will try to convince myself to read strategy books on Go. The game is beautifully simple in terms of rules, but the tactical and strategic complexity from these simple rules is amazing. This complexity is such, that despite the existence of plenty of extremely good chess playing programs, very few good Go playing programs exist for any but the smallest board sizes.