Chapter 3 Section 3 Changes in the Go system

There have been some changes in the Go system in ancient my country in the past dynasties.For example, during the Han, Wei, and Southern and Northern Dynasties, the chess game gradually evolved from 17 vertical and horizontal chessboards, and finally unified into 19 chessboards.Before the Western Han Dynasty, there were 11, 13, 15 and 17 chessboard changes. These have been explained in the transformation of the ancient Go board in the previous section. A brief introduction to the evolution of the Go system in terms of winning and losing calculation methods. In the Han Dynasty, Go used wood to make chess pieces, the so-called "broken wood makes chess".At that time, the shape of chess pieces was square.Later, he felt that the wooden chess pieces were light and unstable, so he used small stones as chess pieces, so the character for chess was written next to "石", which became the word "祈".Archaeologists unearthed 117 stone Go pieces from the Eastern Han Dynasty Tomb in Yuanbaokeng, Bo County, Anhui Province.The chess pieces are 11.5mm square, 3mm thick, and come in two types, pink green and dark green, which shows that the Go pieces in the Han and Wei Dynasties of our country were stone square.During the Tang and Song Dynasties, Go pieces have been changed from square to round.For example, 83 black and white round chess pieces were unearthed in Danyang, Jiangsu, 50 black and white round stone chess pieces were unearthed from the tomb of Yang Gongzuo in the Song Dynasty in Huai'an, and round stone chess pieces were also unearthed from the Song Dynasty tomb in Bo County, Anhui, all of which illustrate this change.

In modern Chinese Go, it is stipulated that black moves first and white moves second.But the ancient chess system is contrary to this, stipulating that white comes first and then black.Only when giving first, the player who is let go with black chess.Judging from the ancient notation, white first or black first is quite chaotic and there is no clear regulation.Su Yizhan, a national champion at the end of Ming Dynasty, proposed to change them all to Baixian in "Yitou · Fanli".According to this, all the Go manuals compiled later were unified as Baixian.Japan's modern Go system clearly stipulates that black comes first and then white.After the founding of the People's Republic of my country, in order to facilitate the international exchange activities of Go, our country achieved unity with the Japanese chess system. From 1956, it was changed from white first to black and then to black first to white.

There have been two major reforms in ancient my country for the calculation of the outcome of Go.In the Tang and Song Dynasties, the method of filling in the mesh and counting the spaces was used. The so-called "road filling method" is similar to the method of counting the spaces in Japan today.During the Ming and Qing Dynasties, the method of filling roads was abandoned and changed to counting the real sons on one side, and at the same time, according to the number of blocks, the more blocks on that side, the more retreats.Generally, one child will be refunded for each additional piece.This can be proved from the narration in the fifty-fourth chapter of "Jin Ping Mei Ci Hua":

"...So after filling out the official papers, I counted them. Bai Lai created five pieces of chess, and Chang Zhijie only got two pieces. Bai Laichuang should find Chang Zhijie's third son, and said in his mouth, he lost in these three moves! I quickly counted my chess pieces and lost five pieces."