Go, Weiqi, or Baduk is an abstract strategy board game for two players in which the aim is to fence off 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. A 2016 survey by the International Go Federation's 75 member nations found that there are over 46 million people worldwide who know how to play Go, and over 20 million current players, the majority of whom live in East Asia. The playing pieces are called stones. One player uses the white stones and the other black stones. The players take turns placing their stones on the vacant intersections (points) on the board. Once placed, stones may not be moved, but captured stones are immediately removed from the board. A single stone (or connected group of stones) is captured when surrounded by the opponent's stones on all orthogonally adjacent points. The game proceeds until neither player wishes to make another move. When a game concludes, the winner is determined by counting each player's surrounded territory along with captured stones and komi (points added to the score of the player with the white stones as compensation for playing second). Games may also end by resignation. The standard Go board has a 19×19 grid of lines, containing 361 points. Beginners often play on smaller 9×9 or 13×13 boards, and archaeological evidence shows that the game was played in earlier centuries on a board with a 17×17 grid. The 19×19 board had become standard by the time the game reached Korea in the 5th century CE and Japan in the 7th century CE. 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 (c. 4th century BCE). Despite its relatively simple rules, Go is extremely complex. Compared to chess, Go has a larger board with more scope for play, longer games, and, on average, many more alternatives to consider per move. The number of legal board positions in Go has been calculated to be approximately 2.1×10170, which is far greater than the number of atoms in the observable universe, which is estimated to be on the order of 1080.
Names of the game The name Go is a short form of the Japanese word igo (囲碁; いご), which derives from earlier wigo (ゐご), in turn from Middle Chinese ɦʉi gi (圍棋, Mandarin: wéiqí, lit. 'encirclement board game' or 'board game of surrounding'). In English, the name Go when used for the game is often capitalized to differentiate it from the common word go. In events sponsored by the Ing Chang-ki Foundation, it is spelled goe. The Korean name baduk (바둑) is a native derived term, most likely originally consisting of 밭 (Yale: pàth, 'cultivated field') + *돍〯 (Yale: twǒlk, "stone", presumed dialectal variant of Seoul 돓〯 twǒlh, 'stone'). Less plausible etymologies include a derivation of Badukdok, referring to the playing pieces of the game, or a derivation from Chinese páizi (排子), meaning 'to arrange pieces'.
Overview
Go is an adversarial game between two players with the objective of capturing territory: that is, occupying and surrounding a larger total empty area of the board with one's stones than the opponent. As the game progresses, the players place stones on the board, creating stone "formations" and enclosing spaces. Once placed, stones are never moved on the board, but when "captured" are removed from the board. Stones are linked together into formations by being adjacent along the black lines, not on diagonals (of which there are none). Contests between opposing formations are often extremely complex and may result in the expansion, reduction, or wholesale capture and loss of formations and their enclosed empty spaces (or "eyes"). One essential aspect of the game is control of the sente (that is, controlling the offense, so that one's opponent is forced into defensive moves); this usually changes several times during play.
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![Go (game): The illustration [A] displays the four "liberties" (adjacent empty points) of a single black stone. Illustrations [B], [C], and [D] show White reducing those liberties progressively by one. In [D], when Black has only one liberty left, that stone is under attack and about to be captured and eliminated (a state called atari).[22] White may capture that stone (remove it from the board) with a play on its last liberty (at D-1).](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/d/dc/Golibs.png/330px-Golibs.png?utm_source=en.wikipedia.org&utm_campaign=parser&utm_content=thumbnail)
