Random start go

    Keywords: Variant

Play go from a legal position that is randomly chosen.


I have played this, as implemented by the Maldoo machine of Yehouda Harpaz (see [ext] http://www.maldoo.com/). That makes setting up the initial position painless; one plays on by pressing touch-sensitive points. Suitable for children, for example.

Charles Matthews


I recently experimented with this as a method of handicap placement. It was fun, but I don't have any other conclusions to report. - Migeru


Are we talking about in initial board setup that is determined by choosing one of (white, black, empty), with equal probability, for every point on the board? Sounds interesting. I would prefer that the sequence in which the points are chosen does not make any difference to the initial board setup. This could be made to work by abandoning any setup that created an illegal position (i.e captured stones). I think that about 1% of these random boards are legal. Obviously you would need some software to create the initial position.


See also Wild Fuseki for a discussion of how to implement this on a Go server.


This is a copy of the living page "Random start go" at Sensei's Library.
(OC) 2009 the Authors, published under the OpenContent License V1.0.
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