Games: Chess, Go, Backgammon
One peripheral topic I’ll write about here and there is games and problems that make the brain sweat a bit. I’ll kick things off with a post about quality implementations of three old and popular strategy games: Chess, Go and Backgammon. I present ways to play each against a computer program or online against human opponents.
The games
Go is an ancient asian board game in which one tries to take and protect the largest territory possible. The rules are simple, but games can get very complex. A peculiarity of this game is that it’s hard to create a computer program to play it well, so average players can beat most programs.
Backgammon is a game in which each oponent’s checkers move around the board in opposite directions, each trying to get his own checkers out of the board before the other. Here’s a good summary of the rules, and here’s a quick video tutorial to see it in action.
I’m pretty sure chess doesn’t need introduction, but you can brush up on the rules over at Wikipedia.
The Gnu software
For all three games, some very good versions I found comes from the Gnu project. They’re free, open source, and all run on Windows, Mac OS X or Linux (except for chess on Mac).
Chess
- On Windows, simply download WinBoard (the Windows binary)
- On Linux, you need to install Gnu Chess and xboard
Go
- You first need to download Gnu Go;
- Then download qGo, install and launch it;
- In the “Options -> Preferences” dialog, go to the “Computer Go” tab;
- Select the path for the Gnu Go program (.exe) you installed before.
Backgammon: Gnu Backgammon
Yahoo! Games
If you’ve understood the rules and want to play against human, live opponents, Yahoo! Games is a good place do it, for all three games. They’re Java or Flash-based, and you can find varying levels of opponents in multiple virtual rooms.
Of course, as said above, you can use each Gnu program mentioned to play the respective game online, too, but the Web based version may be nice if you’ve got some time to kill at school/work where you can’t install these applications.
Game problems
These problems are puzzles of varying levels of difficulty that focus on a small part of a game. GoProblems.com and ChessProblems.com offer interactive and Java-based problems. For Backgammon, here’s a list of of problems and coresponding solutions.
