Go Metaphors for Life and Strategy
Ever since being introduced to Go in grad school, I've loved the game. It's simple. I can teach you the rules in 5 minutes and you won't likely forget them. Basically, each player gets black stones or white stones. You place a stone anywhere on the board during your turn. If your stone becomes completely surrounded (e.g. if every space it's connected to contains a stone of another color) then the stone is captured. But if you extend your stone by connecting it to more of your stones, then the whole group must be surrounded by stones of the other color in order to kill it.
That's how to play. That's it. The only other chunk you need to learn is how to score. During the laying down of stones, each player creates bounded territories that they control. At the end of the game, each player gets a point for every open position they control, and a point for every captured stone or stone in their territory that is obviously capturable (called "dead" stones).
From Go's simplicity there emerges a great wealth of complexity and strategy. And "emerge" really is the right word here, much of the complexity is an emergent property of the simple rule set. Case in point – two eyes. If you form a group of stones that has two separate open spaces ("eyes"), then that group can not be captured. This isn't a rule of the game, but is just an outcome of the rules already mentioned above. Why can't you kill a group that has two eyes? It's because you can only put down one stone at a time and killing a shape with two eyes would require you to put down two stones simultaneously – which you can't do.
Something I like even more about Go are the metaphors that seem to apply well in strategy and tactics of everyday life. The following list was me + AI working together to collect a set of those metaphors, and I wanted to put this in my blog here so that I could refer back to it and add to it later. Enjoy!
