Originating in China more than 2,500 years ago, Go looked deceptively simple. It is played on a nineteen-by-nineteen grid board with a few handfuls of black and white stones. The players each take turns placing a stone on an intersection of the grid. The goal: capture territory on the board by surrounding empty points with your stones, and get your opponent’s stones too. It’s one of the most strategically complex games in existence, with the number of board positions in the order of 10^170, dwarfing the estimated number of atoms in the observable universe, which is closer to 10^80.
