Go is better than chess because

Because Go have made Google created Alpha Go, which become part of and bring progress to better AI application in real world. Artificial intelligence could be one of humanity’s most useful inventions.

Chess can’t do that.

Do you think Google would not have created a Superhuman AI if it wasn’t for Go?

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Because it is more “woke”:

The pieces are egalitarian rather than hierarchical.

The pieces don’t discriminate religiously.

The pieces don’t support the enslavement of animals.

:wink:

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But they exhaust nice big trees and shells…

Chess sets also use wood (or pollute with plastic, a hydrocarbon product), and vintage sets often used ivory for the white pieces.
:wink:

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Google will still create. But with slower progress. I think.

image

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Go is the same as chess because:

“This is the beauty of chess. It is a debate without words, a silent conversation (although ‘trash talking’ is a common and entertaining feature of street chess). You must put yourself in your opponent’s shoes, read them and understand them. You must assess their style, identify their strengths, learn their weaknesses and vulnerabilities, discern their strategy, predict their moves. These techniques aren’t just relevant to chess — they are life skills too. The ability to look ahead and see round corners is just as valuable in the worlds of business and politics as it is on a chessboard.”

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I played some street chess at Dupont Circle in Washington in the 1970s, and trash talk was no part of it. It’s a sign of our current times, I am sorry to say.

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Go is better than chess because every chessplayer knows where to go, but a Go player doesn’t know which way to go.

text bot j1-jumbo(178B) by AI21 studio

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No one is better than anyone, but go is more complicated

My lichess ranking would like to have a word…

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Go has bigger contribution to AI development (deep neural system) compared to chess.

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As a Chess players of 50 years, I can’t bring myself to say that Go is categorically better. They are both, imo, LIGHT YEARS better than any other game though.

I learned to pay Go decades ago, but every time I try to get into it, something in my personal life interrupts my learning and I have to start over a few years later, up until this last time. I’ve only played about 50 games of Go in my life, but I absolutely LOVE the game.

Chess is better than Go in that:

  1. More pieces afford a better opportunity to coordinate attacks.
  2. VASTLY more opportunities and learning materials, at least in the West, although the internet is changing that (YEA OGS!!!)
    3)Much easier to play a casual game, because of the sheer number of moves and time involved in Go.
    4)Chess is less abstract.

Go is better than Chess in that:
1)The coordination of different areas of the board, which can be switched in emphasis back and forth, makes the game continue to be engaging even if you’ve made a mistake in one area, you can often unite that are with another and bring life back into that part of the game.
2) The strategy (and tactics) of Go are unique among “war” games. Capturing is secondary. and there is no one winning goal (like the King in Chess) that you can focus on exclusively.
3)Go is more abstract.

Ok, I know I said both games are better because of their level of abstract thinking. I love both; depends on what kind of mood I’m in.
Both game are absolutely brilliant and great fun for someone who like to think.

About the way the initial question for this forum is phrased: I play a sport called Pickleball. It’s kind of like Tennis meets Ping Ping with a little bit of Chess strategy thrown in. It’s one of the fastest growing sports in the world. It takes faster reflexes, both with the hands and with movement, and more strategy that Tennis. We who play it, love the sport so much it’s hard to put it into words. Tennis players often watch the games on YouTube and proceed to explain why it’s a crummy sport and not fit for “real athletes”, because the balls and paddles are lighter, and you don’t have to run as mush as in Tennis. Still, Tennis players are flocking to Pickleball by the thousands every month. Discussions about which of two sports or games is better can be interesting as long as they are conducted by people who know and love both, but otherwise, they just seem defensive. Go players don’t have to convince anyone that GO is better than Chess, or vice versa. I wish the Tennis players who have never tried Pickleball would withhold their opinion until they’ve tried it. And I think my fellow Chess and Go players should try the other if they have not.

Which game(s) or sport(s) one prefers depends on what they like- how they like to test themselves.
I would be heartbroken if I couldn’t play both.

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…you can sit side by side with your partner/opponent and don‘t get confused by looking at the board from the „wrong“ side.

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looks like AI likes Go more than chess:

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I’m gonna strike an unconciliatory and unapologetic tone here but come at me chess players (its a go forum). Go is undeniably the better game from a game design perspective although ultimately it comes down to taste.

  1. Go has less rules and doesn’t have a bunch of dumb situational rules like chess.
  2. Go is way more likely to be actually balanced (i.e. black and white have equal chances of winning). This is especially true with integer komi or komi bidding.
  3. The overwhelming majority of Go games don’t end in a tie.
  4. Board size can be adjusted according to how long a game you feel like playing.
  5. At almost any point in the game there are more options/viable moves in Go than there are in chess.
  6. The chess community is a lot more splintered globally with different populations playing similar variants like Xiangqi, Jangqi, Shogi, etc. There is no game like Go and players worldwide can play each other with minor differences in rules not affecting this.

Seriously looking for someone to challenge me / fight me on this.

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You can preach to the choir or you can start a fight

but you can’t really do both at the same time ; )

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Since you want to be challenged on this, let me offer such a challenge.

Almost every ruleset that is being used in practice is actually full of dumb situational rules. The original rules as used in Japan, Korea and China in history, all suffer from ambiguity or allow highly complex paradoxical situations (there’s several threads about this, the main one about the Japanese linked by teapoweredrobot above).

There are the Tromp-Taylor Rules and the New Zealand rules on which they were based, which are unambiguous in a mathematical sense, but these aren’t the rules most people use when playing Go.

Well, without komi it seems not to be balanced, and in my personal opinion, komi is one of the “dumb situational rules” that makes the game purposefully asymmetric to keep things fair.

On the other hand, in chess there is no rule favouring either side, except for that one of the colours has to start first. Empirically, it seems that this usually leads to a draw, which is perfectly balanced.

Both chess (with the 50 move repetition rule) and Go (with any form of superko) are provably finite 2-player perfect information games, thus the game is decided (one player has a winning strategy, or both have a drawing strategy). There’s nothing “likely” about this either, it’s a general mathematical fact.

With integer komi, there exists a komi for which both players have a drawing strategy, which would make Go most “fair”, but empirically this komi seems to not be 0, which makes it rather arbitrary in a way. With non-integer komi, Go is provably unfair, even if you introduce komi bidding (which just means the player who can choose which colour to play last is the one who will have a winning strategy).

I don’t see how this doesn’t apply to chess, except that it’s quite unusual. To me, changing the board size significantly also feels quite different. A 9x9 game requires a very different kind of thinking than a 19x19 game.

There are a lot of options for variety in chess, with pieces that move in a different way than the standard way, or with different board sizes, or simply by playing with fewer pieces or in a different layout. The fact that several of these varieties have become very popular (e.g. the eastern variants), speaks for itself.

Such variants quickly seem contrived or unfair for Go.

This is a rather arbitrary point and does not at all decide how interesting a game is to play. As an example, consider playing Nim with millions of stacks of items, then you have literally millions of moves, yet there is quite an easy winning strategy, making it a rather boring game.

For something slightly more complex, consider Gomoku / 5-in-a-row on an infinite grid, where each player can only move, let’s say, 100 moves before the game becomes a tie. Then at any point in the game, there are literally an infinite number of possible moves, but the game is not really much more interesting than Gomoku on a usual finite grid of 19x19 would be.

There are far more chess players than there are Go players: it’s hard to find a Go player outside of East Asia. There are also far more Xiangqi players, and if restricting our attention to Japan, then there are far more Shogi players than Go players.

The fact that wherever you are on the world, it’s easier to find a game of chess or a chess variant, than to find a game of Go, tells me that Go is more “splintered” in the sense of it being hard to find someone to play with.

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