八气围棋简介：一种自然的变体游戏

李喆 /May 19, 2025

Abstract
      The classic game of board game has some interesting variants, such as freestyle chess (Chess960) which has a high profile international tournament. There are also many variations of Go, some modifying the rules of the game and some modifying the style of the board. In most cases, the rules of these variants are more complex than the rules of Go itself, but there are exceptions. A variant form of Go presented here is known as “8-liberty Go”, discovered by the author in 2015, which differs from classic Go by the addition of diagonal lines within all squares of the board, a change that unexpectedly streamlines the rules even further, eliminating the need for artificial rules for Ko fight and maintaining the complexity of Go itself. The fact that the standard Go board did not evolve into this style is perhaps just ahistorical accident, judging from ancient documents.

Through the practice of several tournaments, such as the European Go Congress, and research by offline players, some of the basic techniques of the 8-liberty Go board (connecting, cut, basic life and death, shape, tesuji, etc.) have been preliminarily explored. In this paper, we will introduce the theoretical foundations, the rules and characteristics, and theintroductory techniques of this variant of Go, and demonstrate the role and structure of“intuition, calculation, and judgment” in Go technology in a comparison with standard Go technology.

Keywords: Go，Go variant，the Eight Diagrams，natural rules