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Go On A Board Without Lines
IntroductionThis is an intentionally nameless variant of Go, on a board without any lines. Pieces can be placed anywhere on the board, but otherwise the rules are as close to the rules of Go as I could manage (which I think is fairly close).[1] Sebastian has now written quite a good page on a somewhat revolutionary implementation of this idea, called Euclidean Go, which has some very interesting qualities. His page has lots of informative and descriptive pictures, and is well worth a look once you understand the basic ideas of playing Go in continuous space. Why no name?Because I don't want anyone to think there are any hard and fast rules. It's not like we're going to have a tournament in this variant. It's more of an experiment. Perhaps one day enough people will start playing it that it warrants a name of it's own, but until then it can just be "Go on a board with no lines." HistoryMy Honours thesis involved using artificial neural networks to play Go. While writing it, I realised that my approach was taking advantage of the fact that a position on a Go board could be reduced to a certain number of discreet inputs, but when people play Go, they don't take advantage of this nearly as much. We simply don't see the big space in the middle of the board after 31 moves as 110 individual empty intersections, we just see it as an empty region about so big. So I started thinking, "How could we make the game of Go harder for computers to play?", which is really masochistic, I know, because it's already way too hard. But this variation of Go was the answer to that question (in my opinion). I haven't played it yet (it will have to wait until I write a client for it), but I think that people will find it easy to play, that being strong in Go will translate to being strong in this variant, and that being strong in this (if you were to learn this variant before learning Go) would translate to being strong at Go. And I think if this turns out to be true, that it might mean that we are going about writing Go playing software the wrong way. Rules
The FuturePlaying this game in reality would be nigh on impossible, due to the accuracy required to implement the rules (Is there space for an another stone in between these four?), so I plan to write a computer program to be the ultimate adjudicator. Here's a few features I hope to implement, in the order in which I think I'll add them:
Interesting notesI think I've figured out what the smallest groups with two eyes are under this set of rules:
See this page, which contains some pictures I created to demonstrate these minimal groups. General discussion(moved to GoOnABoardWithoutLines/Discussion) Anyone who feels like doing a WikiMasterEdit of the discussion page would be appreciated. I'll try to get around to it some time.
[1] See the page DougRidgway suggests for similar variations: This is a copy of the living page "Go On A Board Without Lines" at Sensei's Library. ![]() |