Stevertigo: The lines are in fact unnecessary; they aid in framing points on the board for the eye.[1] Simple dots would work as well, as in an ASCII representation of a go board. A stone placed on the board, simply represents a given identity of a point, and represents an influence toward the identity of other points in proximity.
Hence the game is really about giving an identity (black or white) to more points than the opponent.
In Chinese Rules by the way, occupied points, (point with stones) are counted along with the empty territory, to make a total to compare with that of the other player. See Scoring.
[1]
Bill: The lines are extremely important, since they connect the points. Two points are adjacent if a line connects them without going through another point. Stones are connected by the lines, as well.
Bob McGuigan: I agree with both sides of this discussion. In fact, the lines are not necessary but yes, they are extremely important. In looking at a position on the board the lines help to see good shape and balance. I've never tried playing on a board without lines but I think the lines help to see where stones really are since stones are rarely put exactly on the points.
Bob Myers: I've removed some stuff which had been placed at the top of the main page by someone who didn't bother to read the page and understand how it was carefully designed to distinguish among three meanings of the word "point". If this information is considered useful enough I supposed we should create a new page Intersection.
"The lines of the board have intersections wherever they cross or touch each other. Each intersection is called a point. That includes the four corners, and the edges of the board.
The example board has 25 points. The red circle shows one particular point. The red square in the corner shows another point."
tetonca: I read the page. It says 'Introductory' and the other material there is didactic and not at all Introductory. Thanks for the insult and the myopia.
Bob Myers: Welcome to SL. I'm sorry you took my comment as an insult, which it was not meant to be. I just meant that if you had looked a little bit harder you could have seen that this page is what in Wikipedia terms is called a "disambiguation" page, presenting multiple meanings for a word. Now let's say there was a disambiguation page for "Einstein" pointing to one page for Einstein the person and another for Einstein the programming language. Do you agree that it would not be correct to add something about Einstein the person to the top of that disambiguation page? That's the equivalent of what you did. Undoing that was nothing personal. It happens all the time on all wikis. If you think that information is real important and really want to put it up somewhere, then put it up on a new page, as I suggested, or on a subpage of your homepage, and ask people where they think it belongs. Many of the SL pages, like them or not, are the result of literally years of ongoing reorganization and editing. Respect that.
Karl Knechtel: I took the initiative to reorganize things a bit, incidentally providing a home for the new content. I hope the new structure is agreeable to everyone.
tetonca: Thank you, Bob. I do appreciate the thought you put into your response to my comment, and your editorial decision. It makes sense to me, and works well, having looked at it again. The point about disambiguation pages is well said, indeed. Oops.
tetonca: Karl, that works for me. Thank you! I'll link to point/ intersection where I see the need to emphasise its meaning in-context (atari, empty point, others).