[mquander]

I'm of moderate strength at both, being a chess expert and a 1d-1k KGS. Some brief comments:

- Go makes me confront my fear of heuristics. My unconscious ability to pattern match the right moves is always ahead of my ability to understand why they are right, although I try to catch it up by thinking really hard. It's a unique experience.

- Both the rules and strategy of Go feel more elegant in the mathematical sense of being a composition of simple ideas, which I like. Chess feels more like a set of arbitrary pieces of knowledge.

- The handicap system in Go is an objectively awesome way to have players of different strengths play competitively. In chess, you can almost never play with someone 400 rating points your inferior and have it be a satisfyingly competitive game -- giving piece or pawn odds changes the game completely. In Go, if you give someone four stones, it feels like you're still playing Go.

- When watching strong players, I like the fact that there aren't draws in Go. It makes the game dramatic until the end.

- I like chess problems better than Go problems, and I personally find a level of beauty and variety in amazing chess brilliancies which surpasses what I perceive in great Go moves. I don't know of a Go equivalent to http://timkr.home.xs4all.nl/chess/chess.html.

- At least at an amateur level, it's harder to make a critical, near-irrecoverable mistake in Go -- there's not as much of a snowball effect making an advantage into a bigger advantage. That makes it feel less stressful for me when playing long games.

[dulse]

Go problems feel super compelling to me. Typical problems can be boring "counting" exercises, but I find it hard to beat something like the ear reddening move: http://senseis.xmp.net/?EarReddeningMove

There is a great series on youtube on fantastic moves from professional games with commentary in English: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CJ9Oexs59CE&feature=relmf...

They are really beautiful in part because they become tesuji through a confluence of factors that reverberate across the entire board. It can be hard to see for amateurs (including me) but once you give them the right context and insight, they become startlingly brilliant.

Also, it's interesting you find it hard to make a critical mistake in Go - this feels very common to me. For example, a decision like deciding to defend a group instead of sacrificing it (which comes up all the time) often snowballs really quickly.

[mquander]

Also, it's interesting you find it hard to make a critical mistake in Go - this feels very common to me. For example, a decision like deciding to defend a group instead of sacrificing it (which comes up all the time) often snowballs really quickly.

I do that too, but you have a lot of room to back out before your one mistake becomes a losing mistake. If I neglect a group inappropriately, and then make it heavy, and then try desperately to defend it, and eventually fail to survive with no compensation, that's a lot of mistakes; and I usually could have chosen to stop and cut my losses for quite a while before it came fatal.

In chess, you can have long sequences in the midgame and endgame when the game is on a fine tactical balance, and one not-obviously-awful, ill-considered move can either put you in an immediately resignable state or make you spend the rest of the game fighting on the brink of defeat, trying to draw. And that's not really a style of play you can opt out of if your opponent chooses it.

[munin]

>At least at an amateur level, it's harder to make a critical, near-irrecoverable mistake in Go -- there's not as much of a snowball effect making an advantage into a bigger advantage. That makes it feel less stressful for me when playing long games.

I think you mean, at an amateur level, it's hard to see the critical, irrecoverable mistakes that you and your opponent make ;)

[Someone]

"Both the rules and strategy of Go feel more elegant in the mathematical sense of being a composition of simple ideas, which I like. Chess feels more like a set of arbitrary pieces of knowledge"

That is exactly the reason that I think go (1) may be solved before chess is solved.

For go, there are some results that give hope that an all encompassing theory exists. For chess, the best we have are results of exhaustive searches of relatively simple situations and a bunch of heuristics. It is true that, together, those have led to spectacular results, but I do not think they will lead to a proof about who wins chess.

(1) to be exact: Mathematical go, as defined in http://www.amazon.com/Mathematical-Go-Chilling-Gets-Point/dp.... ko rules can have variations, and there are variations in how to count points at the end of a game. Both may affect only a tiny fraction of games, but a alpha-beta search may need only one path that is a win under ruleset A and a loss under ruleset B to change the outcome of a game.

[docgnome]

"it's harder to make a critical, near-irrecoverable mistake in Go"

You must not have seen me play :-p

[louischatriot]

I especially agree with your first point. In Go, I often play moves just because I find them beautiful. Even in life-or-death situations, I begin by finding the "most beautiful" moves :)