Omnivorous notes:
Chess is complex.
Yes it is. But it makes my head hurt, like Catholic Scientist's cartoon of Jackie Chan...
So is Go (Weiqi, Baduk....)
I have spent of bit of time studying this game, but I am so poor at it after all that. I saw that I would have to do a thick collegiate concentration at my study of it. And somehow the result in my case was unsatisfactory. The Ko rule is very nice in practice, but very bad in theory - the
opposite of the usual state of affairs. But Go is lightyears ahead of avoiding stupid rules on so many games, like Chess or Shogi. For a while it seemed that Go was so perfect you could almost imagine, when the aliens arrived on Earth, asking them how big their Go board was - so as to get a measure of how smart they were. But....this was quickly squashed by the various different rule sets for what should be a simple rule set - especially when it came to Seki or Super-Ko.
So, for awhile I fell into designing my own abstract games....
Years later I have seen that this is even a much worse trap into obsessive darkness than being a singer/songwriter, which I still am.
- xongsmith, 5.7d
™ Version 4.2
