This course is for beginner or intermediate level player and will be taught in English.  Rules of Go (include ko and end game counting), basic joseki, fuseki and tesuji will be covered.  Homework will be life-and-death problems, and there will be a small tournament at the end of semester.

About Go (game)

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Go is an abstract strategy board game for two players, in which the aim is to surround more territory than the opponent. The game was invented in China more than 2,500 years ago and is believed to be the oldest board game continuously played to the present day.^[1][2] As of mid-2008, there were well over 40 million Go players worldwide, the majority of them living in East Asia.^[3]As of December 2015, the International Go Federation has a total of 75 member countries and four Association Membership organizations in multiple countries.^[4]

Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is very complex. Compared to chess, Go has both a larger board with more scope for play and longer games, and, on average, many more alternatives to consider per move. The lower bound on the number of legal board positions in Go has been estimated to be 2 x 10¹⁷⁰.^[5][6] In a simple and anecdotal way of explaining of the rules of Go, a teacher simply says to a student “you may place your stone (playing piece) on any point on the board, but if I surround that stone, I may remove it.”

Go was considered one of the four essential arts of the cultured aristocratic Chinese scholars in antiquity. The earliest written reference to the game is generally recognized as the historical annal Zuo Zhuan^[7][8] (c. 4th century BC).