Is Go the hardest game? Absolutely.
With its simple rules but profound complexity, Go stands as arguably the most difficult and intellectually demanding board game ever created. Mastering Go requires rigorous study, creativity, nuanced strategy, and intense practice that takes a lifetime to fully develop.
In this in-depth guide, I‘ll explain what makes Go so notoriously challenging compared to other classic games like chess, shogi, or backgammon. As an avid Go player and teacher for over 10 years, I‘ve experienced first-hand the countless subtle difficulties that make Go a truly deep game.
A brief history of Go
Before analyzing what makes Go so hard, let‘s do a quick overview of the game‘s origins and basics:
Go originated in ancient China over 2500 years ago. The earliest written references date back to 548 BCE.
The standard board is a 19×19 grid. Players alternate placing stones on the intersections.
The goal is to control more territory on the board than your opponent.
Tactics involve surrounding empty space, capturing opponent groups, influencing the whole board, and more.
The game ends when both players pass consecutively. Then points are counted to determine the winner.
Despite the straightforward rules, Go quickly evolves into a complex mess of interconnected battles. With hundreds of black and white stones dotting the grid, the emerging patterns reveal both beauty and hidden difficulty.
Even after studying Go for many years, I‘m still humbled by how much I have yet to grasp. I‘ve concluded Go‘s difficulty arises from five key factors:
1. Incomprehensibly huge game tree complexity
Go has a game tree complexity estimated between 10^170 to 10^360 possible games. For comparison, chess is around 10^120.
On a 19×19 board, the average number of possible moves per turn is 250. For chess on an 8×8 board, it‘s 35 moves per turn.
This means the game tree for Go dwarfs even chess by many orders of magnitude. It far exceeds capacity of even the most powerful supercomputers.
I cannot stress enough how large these numbers are. The complexity is literally beyond human comprehension. After just a few plays on a 19×19 board, predicting long-term strategy is impossible.
| Game | Game Tree Complexity |
|---|---|
| Go | 10^170 to 10^360 |
| Chess | 10^120 |
| Backgammon | 10^20 |
| Tic-Tac-Toe | 255,168 |
Table 1: Comparing game tree complexity across popular board games
As you can see in Table 1 above, Go completely dwarfs the game tree complexity of even immensely difficult games like chess. This exponential quantity of possibilities is the first major reason why Go is so challenging. The sheer information processing required is astounding.
2. Capturing isn‘t the main goal
Unlike chess where forcing checkmate ends the game, capturing opponent stones is not the ultimate goal in Go.
Rather, players aim to control more territory on the board. This indirect goal adds significant complexity and subjectivity when evaluating board positions.
In chess, material value (based on captured pieces) provides an objective measure of who is winning. But in Go, it‘s possible to have fewer captured stones yet still be ahead due to better territory control.
This abstract concept of territory makes rational evaluation of seemingly simple board states perplexingly difficult. After 10 years playing, I still struggle to accurately estimate who is ahead in the early and mid game phases.
3. Local battles influence the whole board
In chess, you can often focus your attention on a specific area of the board. But in Go, local stone interactions exert influence across the entire grid.
Let‘s consider a basic example:
- Black plays a stone at A3 to strengthen their group locally.
- This subtle play could also indirectly weaken White‘s overall bottom territory.
- Or it could affect a separate battle unfolding in the top left corner.
The cascading effects of any single stone placement are challenging to reason through. Seemingly small local fights often have dramatic global consequences that do not reveal themselves until much later.
I am continually amazed by how a simple move by a strong player ends up indirectly impacting the evaluation of large swaths of territory. The deeply intertwined nature of influence between local and global makes parsing board positions perceptually difficult.
4. Opening principles are less defined
Chess openings have been studied extensively, with many established principles and "book moves" that provide a foundation for early play. But Go has a less rigid set of guidelines.
The vast 19×19 grid and ruleset of Go allows for an exponentially greater variety of viable opening moves and sequences.
While there are certainly some guiding principles, there is far more room for creativity and variation from the very first stone placement.
This can be both exciting and frustrating. The complex web of opening move possibilities presents another major cognitive challenge. There are few "shortcuts" in the form of established opening theory to reduce the decision complexity.
5. Intuition must be balanced with calculation
High-level Go relies on a balance of intuition-based pattern recognition and intensive reading ahead to calculate variations.
But the extreme game tree complexity quickly exceeds analytical reading abilities. After just 5-10 plays on a full board, most humans cannot accurately read out all possibilities.
This forces heavy reliance on intuitive judgments regarding good "shape", influence, territory evaluation, life-and-death analysis, etc.
Yet pure intuition alone is not sufficient to play at an expert level. Some amount of reading ahead is still required to traverse the game tree.
Balancing and blending these skills is incredibly challenging. Even after years of play, I still struggle to find the right intuition-calculation equilibrium. This dyadic approach distinct from pure computation or pure intuition adds another wrinkle of complexity.
Conclusion: Embrace the difficulty
In summary, Go presents an unparalleled level of complexity and difficulty due to:
- The incomprehensibly enormous game tree complexity
- Indirect goals involving territory control
- Cascading influence from local to global
- Less defined opening principles
- The need to blend intuition and calculation
For those looking for the ultimate strategic challenge, look no further than Go. Don‘t let the simple rules fool you – behind its facade of simplicity lies near infinite depth. But this boundary-pushing difficulty also makes each small incremental improvement uniquely rewarding.
While mastery of Go may be unattainable in one lifetime, the journey itself imprints a profound mark. So embrace the difficulty, appreciate the small lessons, and see how far you can push your limits in the exquisite game of Go.
