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.
--indeed, I posted my discovery to an online go forum myself, and it got a surprising refutation from Tuomo Salo 3 dan: http://senseis.xmp.net/?ProvableStrategyForWinningFreePlacement25HandicapGo A 1 kyu then attempted (probably correctly) to produce a 54 stone handicap solution: http://senseis.xmp.net/?ProvableStrategyForWinningFreePlacement25HandicapGo%... Both my (wrong) discovery and the refutation and attempts to rediscover the answer, all are quite interesting. Go is a lot deeper than it seems when you learn the amazingly simple rules. In fact, after many years play, go still is a lot deeper than it seems and even the greatest players seem to regard it as inexhaustible.