16 April 2008

Go

The game of go.

I first learned about the game of go in 2001 in the book The 48 Laws of Power, by Robert Greene. It was a favorite game of Mao Tse Tung; he used it to screen prospective military officers for skills. Greene compared it to chess, and used the comparison as an analogy for the differences in eastern and western military tactics. It also served as an analogy for Mao's tactics. Rather than force on force confrontations, Mao often avoided face to face fights, and dispersed into terrain considered "useless" by western (or western trained, as the Kuomintang was) military commanders.

Since then, I have been playing on and off with various levels of study. I use the free version of The Many Faces of Go quite a bit, and I also ponied up the dough for the full version as well.
Since starting this deployment, I have also been playing Go on Facebook.

Chess is played on a 9 X 9 board, with 81 positions for movement total. Go is played many different sized boards, but the most common size for competitive play is 19X19, with 361 positions for movement, more than 4 times as much space. This yields a corresponding difference in the tempo of the two games. In chess, confrontation is almost immediate, and the objective to bring as much strength to bear on the opponent as possible. In Go, the game can develop for many turns before confrontation can occur. Stronger moves are often those than command open space, rather than directly attack enemy stones. In China, the game is called "weichi," ("go" is the Japanese name) which means "the surrounding game," and this is a fair description of the objective. Whoever has greater control of space, greater freedom of movement, will generally win.

In go, stones do not move once placed on the board. However, they can be captured and removed from the board, which does create highly dynamic situations.

No computer program has yet been written that can compete with the best human go players.

A famous go player once said that one could spend an entire life playing go and it would not be a wasted life. I don't know if I would go that far, but it continues to fascinate me even after seven years.

See this blog.

Writing dates: 28 Mar 08, 13 Apr 08, 16 Apr 08
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2 comments:

Anne Wellington said...

I'm in the middle of The 48 Laws of Power right at this moment! Mostly the book has made me realize that I'm an inherently manipulative person because I haven't actually learned anything, mostly I just think "duh." But I do enjoy all the historical anecdotes that the book offers. (Side note: A frequent problem I've found with teaching/studying history is that history is intensely interesting when it's taught anecdotally. It's also incredibly incoherent--you learn no sense of what was going on elsewhere in the world. I think it would be very difficult to be a good history teacher.)

Anyway, references to that book have come up in the strangest places. I first came across it in an entry of a blog I read written by a prostitute. (She's a good writer and the blog covers an amazing spectrum, from graphic descriptions of her interactions with customers to musings on her own life--I'll include an excerpt at the bottom) The next time I saw reference to it was on the website of Tucker Max, who listed it on his "reading list", which is actually what inspired me to buy it--a book endorsed by Tucker Max (if you don't know him, look him up) AND a prostitute?? SIGN ME UP.

Anyway, I'm really enjoying it, even though it's slow going because I'm also in the middle of two other books and Power has been regulated to bathtub reading, which only lasts as long as the warm water.

As promised, an excerpt:
Time and time again my inherent insecurity rammed up against the world I gained access to by escorting. My ticket in was youth and relative good looks, which only reinforced my subconscious fears that those were the only valuable things about me. You don’t get fancy dinners for being smart or funny, or at least I never had. All my glimpses into the upper echelons of society were gained by being young and sexually available. A part of me wondered if I should aim higher, try to cash my chips in a more permanent way or at least a more lucrative one. But the truth is, while I was willing to sell my body, I wasn’t willing to sell my independence.

Apr 17, 2008, 9:49:00 AM
Dave Witt said...

Are you still working on On War? Cause if you actually make it through, I will be calling to quiz you on info for my next masters class. I only made it through about 75 pages.

Well, for a Greene-ish comment on your comments, you will find that most people are manipulative in their way, it's just a matter of method.

One of the best history classes I ever took was military history, because the unifying theme made it much more coherent. This is something else I've learned about history, and maybe this is because I am older now than in school: when you start to assemble the collage of anecdotes into a whole, it all makes a lot more sense, and I think this has happened as I have gotten out into the world and connected a lot of those.

Re: Tucker Max, yes, my cousin gave me a signed copy of his book, though I've only read short parts of it; generally not my cup of tea.

It took me something like 2 years to finish 48 Laws. (It was the two years when the war started, but no one else lets me use that as an excuse, so I won't start trying again.)

Apr 22, 2008, 7:02:00 AM

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