I posed Warren Smith's puzzle to a group of people who play go online, to see if they could improve on his symmetrical answer. Alas, they broke it with a quadruple-ko bombshell which leads to a draw (or an anullment of the game). However, slow progress is being made getting the number back down from astronomical levels: http://www.littlegolem.net/jsp/forum/topic2.jsp?forum=20&topic=340 Alas, I know next-to-bugger-all about go, so can't actually contribute anything to the discussion myself, but can at least mediate the mathematical fun aspects of such a discussion. (Of course, you're welcome to sign up and thrash the pants off me at dots and boxes too.) Phil [Are there archives of this list? I don't keep the old digests, so have no idea exactly which post I should be responding to.] -- () ASCII ribbon campaign () Hopeless ribbon campaign /\ against HTML mail /\ against gratuitous bloodshed [stolen with permission from Daniel B. Cristofani]