My name is Luke and I live in Chicago, IL. I am fairly new to go, I started about 3 weeks ago and I have begun to grasp the basics and win more games on a 9x9 than I lose at the rank I am at on OGS (~25k). Professionally I am a software developer and this game scratches a similar itch as my job. I love puzzles so this game is a perfect fit. I have not only fallen in love but I have already introduced a few friends to the game as well and they love it too!

I look forward to improving and enjoying this community .

Welcome, Luke.

Hi! There are surprising number of programmers here. Have you tried writing a go AI yet?

Haha yeah right! I have not tried that... there's a reason why Google only made such great achievements less than 5 years ago . A chess AI would be considerably easier and even that I have not approached. But then again, I do mostly web application development. Usually it would be someone with more of a data science or machine learning background who could do that.

Although, I have much respect to anyone trying to do it! It's an incredibly complex game and my feeble mind only grasps the smallest bit of it .

Even top humans feel this way now.

Hi Luke,

If you are on the north side, you might want to look up the Evanston Go club; on the west side, Aurora/Naperville; and the far south side my new club in Merrillvile, Ind.

Good luck on your journey!

There are several clubs in Chicago itself. See http://www.usgo.org/where-play-go?state=IL#listing

Except that list is out of date. Tinley Park is closed, Yu Go links to a club in California, and the Chicago Go club lost their venue and shut down, at least for now.

See also:

http://evanstongoclub.org

Well, I'm no longer a Chicago-land person. Dating myself I'll say that before I became a go player I used to play chess at the No Exit Cafe in its original location on Foster Street in Evanston, around the year 1960. When the No Exit moved to Chicago and became a go venue I had left the area, and I didn't become a go player until the mid 1970's. I'm always curious why large cities like Chicago and New York have so few thriving go clubs. Now in-person go clubs are thin on the ground due to the convenience of playing on line but this dearth of clubs dates to long before the internet.

Welcome! Looks like you are doing great. By introducing the game around you I hope you got a bunch of opportunities to play fun real life games, and that would be awesome.