"Software & The Game of Go" by David Nolen (Strange Loop 2023)

Familiarity with the ancient game of Go (Weiqi/Baduk) has noticeably increased outside of Korean, Japan and China thanks to the historic match between Lee Sedol and DeepMind's AlphaGo in 2016. However, this talk isn't about contemporary machine learning techniques (though we may touch upon those topics), rather we explore the congruences between the act of writing software and learning how to play this beautiful game. As Yu Ji writes in the preface to the Xuanxuan Qijing published in mid-1300s (you read that right):
"There is nothing it [Go] does not encompass in the rise and fall of the Way of the World, and in the waxing and waning of Man's affairs."
David Nolen
Vouch
@swannodette
David Nolen maintains ClojureScript. He works at Vouch. He lives in New York City.
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Recorded Sept 21, 2023 at Strange Loop 2023 in St. Louis, MO.
thestrangeloop.com

[@nick_eubank]

At the risk of being “that pedantic dude”, while I appreciate the metaphor, for the record Go isn’t purely additive. stones can be captured. The end state does not (necessarily) contain the entire history.

[@Lukeisun7]

Ive been interested in Go since I watched that AlphaGo documentary, definitely more inclined to check it out now. Great talk!

[@gJonii]

Go is one of the two or three things during my life that massively impacted my thinking and outlook on life. It's one of the basic arts I wish everyone knew at least basics of, it changes you.

[@DeclanMBrennan]

As a Star Trek fan, one of the standard Go openings had a familiar name.

[@rito_ghosh]

Factually incorrect: at about 8:00 he describes Yasunari Kawabata as the first non-Western Nobel Prize winner in Literature, but it was actually Rabindranath Tagore from India who won the Literature Nobel Prize in 1913, where Kawabata won it in 1968.

[@64standardtrickyness]

The ancient Chinese rules also penalize two points per group that you have.

[@gJonii]

Stone counting is the only true ruleset to go.
But, admittedly, counting on a physical board, the Japanese style territory counting is waaaay easier.
Chinese area scoring I find quite unsatisfying middle ground between the practicality of Japanese territory scoring, and the theoretical beauty of stone counting. It's a compromise, so it's kinda good both ways but not that good either way.
The idea being, Stone counting counts only the stones placed on the board. Each stone your enemy can't capture, is a point. Place more stones, you win.
Chinese rules take a shortcut, with concept of territory, players agree that "this player COULD fill these intersections with his stones, so we agree they're his points". You count both stones, and the territory. But, what gets lost is that in stone counting, each group would have to leave two empty intersections so enemy can't capture them. Counting only stones, these empty intersections then are stone counting "eye tax", two points per a group.
Japanese rules count only the empty intersections, and "prisoners", the captured stones. With reasonable assumptions about the game, prisoners + territory correspond to the area(living stones + territory), but the original theoretical beauty gets kinda lost, because now adding stones to the board can reduce your points, and handling some edge cases require just special rules to decide how to score them. It's a theoretical mess, but man is it easy to count on the physical board.

[@LittleBobbyHasTables]

​@@gJoniiI agree with everything you said. I also like the stone scoring, but it just takes too long to finish the game. Also Japanese rules are a mess, but the scoring is very easy. At least on a real board, I prefer AGA rules (pass stones and white is always last) - you basically get Chinese/area scoring, but you can use Japanese/territory counting to score the game.