Life In 19x19

You could have gnugo "play out" the game and then use that score.

If there are an infinite number of choices for each (or even just one) move, then voilà, the number of possible games is infinite.

Examples:
⋅  Go on an infinite board
⋅  Go on a board without lines

(I am not claiming that any of these are good games.)

The problem with ...

Rather than hijack an existing thread
http://www.lifein19x19.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=13358&start=0
I'm starting a new one.

Has anyone ever heard of multi-move go, where you play more than one stone per turn? It might be interesting. For example, if you were allowed 3 stones ...

Arimaa, though it was deliberately designed to have a high branching factor.

Yes, Arimaa has a branching factor of about 20k which is bigger than go with about 400, but I'm thinking bigger! For example if you were allowed to play an arbitrary number of stones in go then the maximum branching ...

Inverting the conversation: Are there any games that have higher game tree complexity than go? Most popular games seem to have low branching factor and a few less popular (like 19x19 hex) seem to have similar branching factor, but do any have significantly larger branching factors? (I can't think of ...

Those are all great points and all seem to say that go is more amenable to teaching games, with the exception of Kirby's (2) which I guess is often true, making teaching games almost necessary. However, for me this makes learning go less enjoyable and I wonder if this causes many beginners to quit ...

It seems to me the go players differ from chess players in their approach playing/learning. With beginner chess players we do some teaching but mostly let them play games (with occasional postmortem), while go beginners seem to spend a lot of time playing "instruction games" against advanced players ...

The computer has not only changed chess openings, it has changed everything. To a computer, chess holds no more mysteries. If you want to know if your move was right, you ask the computer for a 5 minute analysis, and the answer will be definitive.

I think this idea is subtle. Just because ...

perfect -- thanks everyone!

I must be missing the obvious, but is there a way to get an annotated copy of the Sedol/google game in .sgf or at least not a video?

I'm interested in the state of the art for computer go endgames. Does mcts work well in the endgame or are more algorithmic (alpha-beta stuff) or mathematical (ie Berlekamp and Wolfe) or pattern matching (presolved endgame positions) better?

fyi, when teaching or playing with young children, people often play with a less pieces for both players, ie king and 4 pawns vs king and rook or king and 3 pawns vs king. I think this reduces the overload of having to think about too many pieces at once.

Have you tried clicking on 'Edit SGF File' on the KGS splash screen and navigating to the SGF file in the pop-up?

that's exactly the issue -- I'd like to be able to open a file with a single click. (I know it's not a big issue, but on the old version I used to be able to do it.)

After some effort I got cgoban to work on my osx 10.10.5 when I click on it directly, but I can't get it open a sgf file. It's grayed out when I try to use open with "other". Any suggestions?

I know nothing about chess ranks. I don't even know anything about chess except for how the pieces move. But I am curious. What is the hierarchhy of ranks and what are the corresponsing numbers. You mentioned master (2200) and senior master (2400), but what else?

In chess it's mostly ratings ...