The common go maxim
GO: An hour to learn; a lifetime to master.
badly underestimates its times. No one has yet mastered the game in a single lifetime. And learning the rules, I have discovered, takes more than an hour. Indeed, I have spent two years trying to find out what the rules ARE. In the process, I have collected the various different rule sets available here.
For the various options that differ between rule sets, see Fotland's Summary
and the British Go Association
.
The most elementary (but out-dated) rules are survivor wins
.
The most elegant and concise rule set is Tromp/Taylor
.
Similar to Tromp/Taylor rules are those of New Zealand, which I don't have, and the American Go Association as stated in Concise Rules and further detailed in Commentary . The American Go Association has also adopted a set of tournament rules .
Japanese rules are from the Nihon & Kansai Kiins .
From The Go Player's Almanac I have excerpted the Chinese Rules .
James Davies claims that "Modern Korean rules are equivalent to the 1949 Japanese rules which are in turn equivalent to the1989 Japanese rules, although formulated differently."
Ing Chang-ki of Taiwan has promoted the SST Laws of Wei-Chi
Engels has collected a number of rule sets for variants of go.
Spight has proposed that the Mathematical Theory of Go can aid in understanding what any given rule set might mean.