On the Rules of Go, by Ikeda Toshio. Fujitsu; 1992.

This is essentially a vanity press book: I doubt that any go press would have published this book, especially in this form. (Do we really care that the author spent his teenage years devising original proofs of the Pythagorean theorem, or that he cheers up his workers by singing Schubert at them?) He proposes his rules, has some analysis of rules, and presents a game he played vs. Go Seigen. I suppose that if you care a lot about different possibilities for rule systems, this book is worth reading; otherwise, it isn't.

This book is now out of print. Fortunately, there is a nice internet edition of it at http://www.fujitsu.co.jp/hypertext/igo/index-e.html; it contains the complete text of the book.


david carlton <carlton@bactrian.org>

Last modified: Sun Aug 10 20:54:02 PDT 2003