How many squares are there on a Go Board?

General Go Discussion
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How many squares are there on a Go Board?

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What a strange question for a 2 kyu to ask…

19x19 has 361 intersections however if you meant squares then 18x18 is 324

13x13 has 169 intersections however if you meant squares then 12x12 is 144

9x9 has 81 intersections however if you meant squares then 8x8 is 64

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Might be a trick question…

instead of 18x18, might be sum([x*x for x in range(19)]) == 2109

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oh like one of those “count all the squares of any size in this picture” type puzzles? Yeah hmm could be :man_shrugging: need more details :stuck_out_tongue:

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They’re rectangles[1]

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hahahahaha :rofl: touche

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Aww that’s it :slight_smile:

Now the question is… what are these silly things we’ve been using to play Go on OGS with?

Screen Shot 2022-02-09 at 5.00.12 PM
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If we use the rounded off imperial measurements here…

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…then the ratio is exactly 14/15, meaning that a 15x14 rectangle such as this one would be pretty much a perfect square on a correctly dimensioned physical goban:
image

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So that’s… 20 squares?

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Yeah, but who uses imperial units? :stuck_out_tongue:

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The reason physical boards use rectangles is so when you’re sitting behind it the optical illusion makes them look like squares. Since online is top-down over the board, using real squares instead of fake ones gives us the same image.

Think that’s how it goes anyway :stuck_out_tongue:

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I think OP clearly raised an excellent question

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I was assuming/hoping that the approximation is good enough that it will be very close to a square anyways, but too lazy to compute how much off the result would be :stuck_out_tongue:

BRB measuring my goban.

Update: Curses, the 15x14 rectangle is approximately 32.3 cm × 33.0 cm. Should be able to get a bit closer with some other rectangle…

Update 2: Well I did some measurements and some spreadsheeting without much progress. Then I re-did the original measurement and got a very different result, 32.8 cm × 33.0 cm.

With a ratio of 32.8 / 33 ≈ 0.994 I’d call that a pretty good square, as far as the real world goes!

Anyone else want to measure their goban(s) to compare?

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Good luck. A perfect square does not exist, except for within the human mind.

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64mrqy
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Briefly OT… I’ve always wondered: We talk of ‘top’ and ‘bottom’ of the board, which makes sense on a vertical plane monitor…but back in the day it would’ve been horizontal planes. Top/bottom depend on players perspective. Did they maybe used to call it North, South, East, West? @claire_yang maybe knows?

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I believe “top” (as well as bottom, left, and right) is always from black’s perspective.

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Wow @RayTomes username does in fact check out

I am glad to have played the 1d in this thread :joy:

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God damn it, I even read that page some years ago :rofl:

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The discussion in that thread is brilliant haha what a good laugh, we almost made it all the way through the exact same path they did haha I had the same answer as the 10 kyu… sounds about right :sweat_smile:

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