Two people play with a Go board and stones.The players alternate putting black and white stones on the board to surround area, or territory. Whoever has more territory at the end of the game is the winner. There are nineteen horizontal and nineteen vertical games lines on the standard board which form a grid of 361 intersections or "points."

Go is a simple game to learn, but with it's endless permutations it is almost impossible to master. The day is coming soon when chess masters will be overwhelmed by the brute force of computers like Deep Blue which can rapidly explore possible outcome of a game and choose the best course of action. This "brute force" approach is not applicable to Go. For one thing, brute force depends on the ability to perform a quick, accurate positional analysis, but it is qualitatively more difficult to evaluate a Go position than a chess position. In particular, in Go deep analysis is often required just to decide which stones on the board or alive and which stones are dead. A single mistake in this analysis could fatally throw off a computers evaluation.

As a result, Go is a much more interesting computing problem than Chess. Go programmers must try to replace exhaustive search with expert knowledge, as human players do; they must approximate human perception judgment and reasoning. So far there has been little success: the best Go computers today play at the level of an experienced beginner.

Naturally, Go is the perfect game for computer genius Max Cohen (Sean Gullette) and his mentor Sol (Mark Margolis). Both actors spent many hours with the Brooklyn Go Club learning the fundamental rules and the complex etiquette of the game to bring an accurate portrayal to the film.