There are many reasons I enjoy playing go: complex gameplay arises out of simple rules, single mistakes rarely decide games, games between between people of different skill can be handicapped without changing the dynamics of the game too much, there are no draws, and I just like the way it looks. The purpose of this article is to illustrate something else I like about playing go: the ways that it provides practice in basic habits of rationality, that is, the ways in which playing go helps me be less wrong.

I've tried to write this so that you don't need to know the game to follow it, but reading a quick introduction would probably help. (ETA: A commenter below has helpfully pointed to more go info online.) The main aspect to understand for this article is that go is a game of territory. The two sides vie to occupy space and surround one another. If a group of stones is surrounded without sufficient internal space to support itself, it is killed and removed from the board.

Lesson 1: Having accurate beliefs matters.

Here are three examples of a group of white stones being surrounded by black stones. The important distinction between them is whether the white stones will eventually be captured, i.e. whether they are "dead" or "alive".

Fig 1: The white stones are dead.

Fig 2: The white stones are alive

Fig 3: The white stones have ambiguous status.

In Figure 1, the white stones are being smothered by the black stones. They are overwhelmed and cannot escape eventual capture. They are "dead".
In Figure 2, the white stones are surrounded but have sufficient structure to protect their internal space and thus will not eventually be capture by the black stones. They are "alive".
In Figure 3, the issue is unsettled. Depending on how play proceeds, the white stones may eventually live or may eventually die.

Accurately determining whether the white stones in situations like Figure 3 are doomed or not is essential to winning go. There are go training books that consist of nothing but hundreds of exercises in correctly assessing the status of stones and learning the subtleties of how their arrangement affects that status. Correct assessment of life and death is one of things besides a large branching factor that makes computer go so hard.

I once read something on LessWrong which was later labeled The Fundam...

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