Chess or go?

by Carlos PISSOLITO

A saying repeated by strategists maintains that while Westerners play chess, Orientals play go. Let's see.

 As almost everyone knows, chess is played between two players. Each one has 16 pieces. One of them handles Whites, his opponent Blacks. The pieces are moved on an 8 × 8 square chess board, which gives us 64 squares, that alternate their colors between black and white.

Meanwhile, not everyone knows that go is a Chinese game played on a board for two people. To control an area, each player must surround with the stones that controls his opponent's and put the most of them in the enemy territory before the end of the game. Also, you can capture a stone or a set of them and remove them from the board if they are completely surrounded by stones of your color.

Chess is not a game of chance, but a rational and strategic one, since each player will decide the movement of his pieces each turn. The development of the game is so complex that not even the best players (or the most powerful computers) can even consider all the possible combinations. Neither is go. Since despite the simplicity of its rules, it requires a quite complex strategy. But, at this point the way players can make their decisions forks noticeably.

Go has its own set of rules, but they all coincide in general aspects and the differences do not significantly affect the strategy or the development of the game except in exceptional situations. Despite the apparent simplicity of the rules, it requires a rather complex strategy.

For example, accomplished chess players are highly affected by the use of complex mathematical calculations, since the complexity of the chess game tree is calculated around 10,123 possible legal positions. For comparison, the number of atoms estimated to exist in the universe is between about 4 × 1078 to 6 × 1079. This immense number was calculated, for the first time, by Claude Shannon, who is considered one of the fathers of information theory.

On the contrary, the affections to go with its great board (19x19) and the lack of restrictions allow a greater breadth of strategic visions than chess; what makes difficult its programming by means of supercomputers. So many experts in the field of artificial intelligence consider that go requires more elements than those that imitate human thought in chess.

In closing, one last comparison could be made. If chess with its short movements of tiles eating each other, reminds us of Carl von Clausewitz's “On War”  universe, of go with its long positioning maneuvers, it brings us closer to the conception of Sun Tzu.