Outsight Interactive - Software Development Lessons Learned from Go - Comments

Do you think this is what

ffxi gil — Tue, 12 Aug 2008 11:20:11 -0400

Do you think this is what Sun Tzu was talking about, a board game?

As a Westerner I can say I've never heard of the game either, but I'm keen to find an online version so I can start learning. Thanks for the heads up!

a bad start for the article.

Marc3 — Wed, 02 May 2007 17:20:29 -0400

a bad start for the article. go is not a game of territory, it is a game of fight, blood and flesh. it may happen that territory will be counted if no player has been exterminated. however, i enjoyed the proverb about the fist. really nice. and true :)

You are so right. I thought

Choy — Sat, 21 Apr 2007 10:39:12 -0400

You are so right. I thought that a martial arts metaphor might work. But now I see the light. I used to play a lot of go and I never saw the connection.

Now that you've pointed it out it's so clear. I'm sure there's more wisdom that can be gleaned by extending the analogy and taking go wisdom and theory and applying it to coding.

let's see there is fuseki, thickness, eyes, moyo, ... definitely something there.

Thanks for stopping by. I'm

Brandon — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 14:19:50 -0400

Thanks for stopping by. I'm glad you enjoyed the article.

It's been a while since I've done any functional programming (in Scheme, rather than LISP or Haskell), but I remember the overwhelming feeling of cleverness when figuring out just how to achieve something, and the overwhelming frustration when actually trying to implement it and discovering all of the gaps in my perception of the path to success.

They're feelings very similar to discovering and then executing a clever Go move.

Excellent article! I

Entropyfails — Wed, 18 Apr 2007 13:57:12 -0400

Excellent article!

I completely agree that the bizzare, yet structured, search space of Go closely resembles the search space that you access when programming. It is a far different feel than chess for example. I'll extend this analogy further and say that chess feels like programming in Java, because you have to memorizes huge libraries of moves/objects. Go feels more like Lisp or Haskell as you have to learn to create general structures that you fill in as needed.

Good work! I like your group's blog. I'll add it to my loop.

Software Development Lessons Learned from Go

Brandon — Mon, 09 Apr 2007 14:47:31 -0400

The ancient board game Go is the most popular board game in the world, and yet few people in the United States have even heard of it. Go is a game of metaphors: it has been compared to a fine art, a martial art, war, a conversation, life itself. Whereas Chess is a game of capturing prisoners, Go is a game of securing territory.

At it's core the rules of Go are incredibly simple: Two players (Black and White) alternate in placing a single stone on a 19x19 grid. Touching stones of the same color form a unit, which can be captured if all of the unit's neighboring spaces in both the horizontal and vertical directions are occupied by opposing stones. Grid points which are completely surrounded by stones of a single color become territory for that player. The game ends when both players pass their turn (because further moves would be of no value). The winner is determined by adding the number of points of territory plus the number of prisoners taken for each player. You can check out the American Go Association's rules page for a more detailed discussion of the rules of go.

Despite its simple rules, Go is at least PSPACE-hard, and could be as hard as EXPSPACE-complete, and the best Go programs consistently fail to perform much better than an experienced beginner. Though interesting, the computational complexity of the game of Go is not the purpose of this entry. What struck me, somewhere between the comment "software projects are like many other things in the world, like many other things in the world." on a recent entry by Jeff Atwood, and a blip about "writing code as art" by Jeremy Allison, is that the game of Go, like many other things, has something to teach about software development.