Go'ing past Chess

After Slashdot's frontpage post a couple weeks ago of a program that had solved 5x5 Go, I started to learn more about this ancient game. More complex than Chess, it has yet to be dominated by supercomputers. Deep Blue beat Kasparov in Chess a few years back, but the best computer has yet to do very well against even an intermediate Go player.

I remember my friend from second grade Jonathan Pillow teaching me the game Pente on a board used for Go. I caught up with him this year, a couple decades later, and I look forward to some handicapped Go games (impossible with Chess) against him.

The #2 result after Googling "play go" (in quotes) is excellent. After three terrible games today (username applecore), my ranking is 18kyu. Not very good.