the game of Go
So i just realized that i haven’t written much about my favourite game in the whole wide world: Go (aka Baduk, aka Wei Qi, aka ‘that game with the black and white pieces that they play in the movies Pi and A Beautiful Mind)
Go is to Western chess what philosophy is to double entry accounting.
- From Shibumi, bestseller by Trevanian
I guess i’m so enamoured with Go because of its simplicity and beauty. The rules of the game are completely simple and can be learned in moments, but the concepts that emerge from it take a lifetime to understand. Just like the simple habits that an individual ant follows will lead to the complex behaviour of the ant-hill, Go is not just the sum of its parts.
There’s a lot of history, philosophy, and culture surrounding Go. It dates back to perhaps over 4000 years ago in China. There are hundreds of chinese and japanese proverbs relating to Go (more here), innumerable Japanese poems, visual art works, and philosophical texts. The game is both analytical and intuitive, and has a sense of balance in many ways. Black is Yin and White is Yang.
You can never eliminate your opponent from the board…instead, you have to determine the places that you know your opponent will live and those places where you will live, and just try to subtly shift the balance in your favour in order to win. Too aggressive, and you’ll spread your energy too thin and be overwhelmed. Too passive, and your opponent will expand to squeeze you into small isolated enclosures.
The game can also be played in either a competitive or cooperative manner. Some people prefer to play silently and match their wits against their opponent, while others enjoy discussing the intriguing puzzles that appear as the game progresses (sometimes moving off to explore a tangential series of moves before going back to the original positions and continuing).
I must admit that i’m rather sympathetic to the political analogies applied to the game: whereas chess has a lot of focus on the special powers of individual pieces, with one central hero, Go on the other hand is about how many evenly matched individual stones must act collectively to achieve larger goals than any one of them could do alone.
Anyway, i could probably go on all day, but maybe i’ll just stop here with a few links. First, for any newbies, here’s a page of the bare-bones basic rules, starting from the board and the pieces, and continuing to the rules of play and how the game ends. Then, if you’ve learned the basic rules, you can move onto the Beginner Study Section, which goes through some commonly seen situations, and some simple theory of the game.
The best thing though, is just playing a few games. There’s a proverb that says “lose your first 50 games as fast as possible”. The most common mistake of beginners is to sit and agonize over what the best possible move is, when they’ve got very little experience with the game. There’s no point in straining your brain to come up with some kind of grand-master ultra super move when you just learned the rules recently. Just relax and let the games flow by. You’ll absorb it naturally just by paying attention. i like to think of it in taoist terms…if you strain really hard, you’re just going to end up strained. you won’t actually grasp it.
For those who like speed go, practicing mistakes will perfect them. For those who take long to play, the worst move is indeed hard to find without sufficient time and thought. The purpose of go is to make interesting moves and enjoy the game at whatever level one is capable. The benefit of study, discussion and review is to deepen enjoyment. When rank becomes more important than enjoyment, go has changed from a wonderful game into work. When winning becomes more important than enjoyment, go has changed from a source of wisdom to a source of deception. During play try to do your best. This respects your opponent. Victory itself is of little practical consequence, unless you’re a gambler or a professional.
–Wings Across Calm Water Go Club
Ride hard, ride free
February 8th, 2005 at 06:43 am
Anarchism and go. It’s a great mix, with go being, quite possibly, the more addictive of the two. Keep on riding hard and maybe I’ll meet you on KGS one day (aka overdone).