Go! More Than a Game

INTRODUCTION

A SHORT INTRODUCTION TO THE WORLD’S OLDEST, SIMPLEST, AND MOST COMPLEX GAME

For possibly the last four thousand years, Go has enthralled hundreds of millions of people, making it the world’s most often played game. Go has offered all these people not just the fun and the thrills of competition, but most have also thought of it as an enhancement to their mental, artistic, and even spiritual lives.

What Is Go?

Derived from the Japanese word "Igo (Ee-go"), Go is a game played on a 19 line x 19 line board. One player takes black stones and the other takes white stones from bowls or boxes, and they put them down in turns on the intersections. As the stones accumulate, they begin to form groups, and it is with these groups that the game is played. The object is to control the most area on the board, but the result is that they end up also surrounding and sometimes trying to capture each other!

There are only two basic rules that generate the principles of the game, and one can be playing in minutes on a small 9 x 9 board. As one graduates to the larger-sized 13 x 13 and the official 19 x 19 boards, the game’s complexities and subtleties begin to unfold, providing a never-ending source of enjoyment as new levels of play are reached.

Why Play Go?

For one Japanese Noh poet, Go was a form of art and contemplation:

When playing Go, resentments clear away

Thoughts become like the moon arising at night

There, on the beach of the ocean of endless births and deaths

The Go stones become uncountable grains of sand

Even though the players struggle, their hearts remain gentle

In placing their stones down, their hands reveal benevolence

And as the pieces strike the board

The mantra Aum reverberates

Before their eyes rise the boundaries of life and death

And the pattern of Nirvana itself

The white and black stones become the colors of day and night

The star-points become the nine lights of heaven

The three hundred and sixty intersections

Render the numbers of the days of the year¹

For others over the centuries, the game has meant many other things. For a game to survive so long, it had to be something that people felt not only could be played but also should be played.

In early Chinese myths, Go was said to have been brought down from the Heavens over four thousand years ago by King Yao, who taught it to his human son, Dan Zhu, to enhance his mind. The game also proved useful for the mystical Yellow Emperor, who may have lived before or after Yao, when he needed strategies for his war against the armies of the fairy monster, Ji Yu.

Piles of gamelike stones have been found in Shang and Xia tombs dating to c. 2000–1400 B.C., so if Go was invented then, it was probably seen as a living example of the earth-oriented feng shui and acupuncture theories that also developed in that period. The play of the stones might have been seen as collecting and blocking the forces of qi energy as they coursed over the earth-shaped, square board.

On the other hand, if the sky-oriented players of the Zhou, Spring and Autumn, and Warring States periods, c. 1000–200 B.C., invented the game, they might have seen the board as a reflection of the heavens, with the stones as the sun, the moon, and the stars, while the play of the game represented the rhythmic changes of the seasons.

Following in the tradition of the Shang and Xian, the Daoists, would have been eagerly examining and manipulating the balances and imbalances they saw of the ever-changing Dao, and the primal yin-yang energies of their stones.

Their rivals, the civic-minded Confucians seemed to be of two minds. Early on, the usual interpretation of their earliest remarks about the game is that they didn’t like it. However, recent re-dating of these passages to the late 4th and early 3rd centuries B.C. and looking at the contexts, it seems reasonable to assert they were simply using the game as an exemplar of their evolving thoughts about filial piety and human nature and not that they actively disapproved of at least moderate play. And the fact that they didn’t have to explain how it was played indicates that it would have been around for some time, perhaps in a small form without much strategy. (See the Update Chapter for more details).

A little more than a hundred years later, after the oldest board that has been discovered was made in the 2nd century B.C., and after first praising the game, the Confucians, commanded by order-seeking emperors, began altering early myths to convey a different idea. Thus, while Go looked like it might be something worthwhile to teach to one’s children, they implied that playing it was really a seductive and immoral waste of time where youngsters only learned how to gamble, use nasty Daoist strategic tricks and forget their parents.

Similarly, for the early converts to Buddhism (which came to China c. 200 A.D.), it is more than likely that the game was regarded as it is today in Tibet—a dangerous distraction from one’s spiritual duties.

Yet everyone kept playing, and, by 600–1200 A.D., spurred on by changes in the ideas of poetry as art, the production of Go books, the melding of the sky- and earth-oriented varieties of feng shui, and the general blending of Daoism, Confucianism, and Buddhism, playing Go had become a virtue and a reflection of the greater powers of the universe.

More than simply a lesson in the Way of the Dao, the game became for the Confucians an expression of the One and for the Buddhists a method to lift the Twenty-seven Veils of Ignorance that prevented mankind from learning the Truth—on the board and in life. By medieval times, the best players were described as Walking in the Light and Go had joined music, calligraphy, and painting as one of the Four Great Accomplishments that any cultured person would be expected to master.

In Japan, beginning anywhere from 500 to 700 A.D., the game was considered more of a mental martial art and it came to be enjoyed by men, women, monks, samurai and warlords. By about 1600 A.D., it was considered so important by the Tokugawa shoguns that they began sponsoring a professional class of players in four competing, nonhereditary Houses. For the next two hundred fifty years, this honored elite was paid to do nothing but study and improve the game. High-level Go continued to be played in China and Korea, but the quality of Japanese play that resulted from their research and competitions changed the game forever.

Modern Go

After the fall of these traditional societies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it looked like Go would disappear along with the rest of the old order. But then unexpected events began to happen in Japan. Young members of the growing capitalistic forces began to see the strategic principles of the game in a new way. Along with the principles of the Dark School of Daoism and its Thirty-six Strategies, they found that the lessons of Go perfectly embodied the wisdom of modern business practices, both in and out of the office.

Japanese executives learned to look at the national and international corporate worlds as Go boards and designed many of their strategies accordingly. For example, one invested stones in certain areas but avoided wasting them where their opponents were strong. One should try to win, but that had to involve allowing the opponent to win something, too, because all-out fights might destroy both competitors. Go professionals were hired to quicken the wits of office workers, while newspapers slowly realized that the ideas of Go columns, champions, tournaments and clever hype could turn millions of readers into avid fans who bought more newspapers.

As a result, within the first few decades of the twentieth century, while the Japanese retained their heavily spiritual attitude about the game, Go in Japan became what could only be called one of the world’s first mass-market sports. The old, moribund, and quarrelling professional Go associations were reorganized and quickly became the conduits of a system of tournaments that grew to become worth millions of dollars a year, dwarfing, for example, the amount of money spent worldwide on chess tournaments.

Meanwhile, across the seas in China and Korea, Go had been slumbering, but it suddenly awoke in the 1960s and ’70s. There, too, the game suddenly became a mass sport, but for different reasons than in Japan. It had always been recognized for its benefits for children’s education and for its strategic value in the business and political communities, but nationalistic pride became a new factor as young champions began winning big international tournaments, making them wealthy, famous and much emulated. And curiously, although the fervor for Go in Japan had dissipated somewhat, a recent resurgence was sparked by the megahit comic book and animated TV series Hikaru no go. At least for awhile, once again thousands of Japanese children are playing this ancient game.

In the West, too, Go is no longer regarded as the mysterious and obscure activity that it seemed to be thirty or forty years ago. Beginning in the 1970s with the publication of the international thriller Shibumi (sh-boom-ee) by Trevanian, which has sold over two million copies, and the translation of Nobel prize winner Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, the game started to reach a wider audience that culminated with its appearance in the recent movie megahits, Pi, A Beautiful Mind and the first Japanese-Chinese endeavor, The Go Masters.

Trevanian inspired a whole generation as Nicolai Hel, his philosophical warrior hero lyrically linked the playing of good Go to the lifelong pursuit of the Japanese ideal of shibumi : the ability to exercise authority without domination and to know the exquisite refinement that can lay beneath mundane appearances. The Master of Go and A Beautiful Mind demonstrated how Go can be a powerful metaphor for conflict and resolution, while Pi emphasized how the game’s spiritual qualities attach to its complexity. The result today is that many in the burgeoning computer generation have embraced the game. They have found in its principles an ideal game that reflects the world they see themselves as living in: unsolvable and unlimited by sides or direction. And related to this development, one of the newest reasons to introduce yourself to Go is that suddenly, instead of the ten or twenty or hundreds of Go players available to play at your club or association, there are hundreds of thousands of new people to meet, talk with, and play against on Internet game sites all over the world!

Concurrent with the popular interest spurred by Internet Go have been some scientific developments. Since the days of Leibniz in the seventeenth century, Go has fascinated Western scientists, but recently there have been some important new associations. In mathematics, fighting multi-groups in Go games led to significant advances in combinatorial mathematics and the invention of surreal numbers. It also led to the endgame-solving temperature graphs of low-ranked theoreticians that have beaten the best analyses of the highest-ranked professionals—but only for the last few points. Moreover, the incredible magnitude of the number of moves in the longest possible game, and the maximum numbers of possible positions and games have been revealed. If played at one move a second, the longest possible game would long outlast the 1000 trillion years left for the universe according to one theory. The number of possible positions compared to chess is greater than the comparison of the nucleus of an atom to the size of the universe, while the digits of the number of possible games is greater than the number of possible chess games. Again, see the Update Chapter.

Vast numbers also point us to the changes that have taken place in computer Go since this book first appeared in 2003. Back then, a child playing for six months could beat any program, and it would have taken more than a lifetime for a computer to play a Go game the way Big Blue or Fritz played chess. Then suddenly, around 2006, new algorithms were being applied to computers using Monte Carlo methods of computing and their strength suddenly shot up to the point where, in 2010, they were doing well taking high handicaps from professionals on 19 x 19 and sometimes beating them on 9 x 9. To do this, massive machines were looking at board positions and playing out up to 100,000 simulations of about 100 moves a second. (See the Update Section for more details).

Still, it is a very long way from high handicaps to even, and one has to factor in the thought that professionals could probably discover weaknesses if many games were played, so it is still true that only human minds can play really well and that the Go board is one of the last places on earth that has not been dominated by machines.

In the human realm, cognitive psychologists are just as far from solving the mysteries of how our brains play Go. Meanwhile, the technique and principles of high-strategic play keep constantly changing and improving, led first by the Japanese and now by the young geniuses of China and Korea. In the West, Go awareness and education has continued to improve, and more and more Westerners have begun to turn professional. As you learn to play the game, you will see why there is no end in sight as to where developments in Go might lead. Who knows? Go has already been played in space by astronauts and, as chess champion Emmanuel Lasker once commented, If games are played by sentient beings on other planets, then they play Go.

PART I

GO BASICS

CHAPTER ONE

GO IS TO LIFE AS LIFE IS TO GO

—THE CAPTURING GAME

China’s most famous novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber, also called The Story of the Stone, begins when a stone from the Heavens comes down to earth to begin a life. Similarly, in Go the game begins when one player picks up a stone from a bowl and places it on the board. . . .

As you can see on the cover of this book, stones are held between the ends of the first two fingers and are placed on the board one at a time on the intersections by each player in turn. Once on the board, they do not move unless they are captured and taken off.

The Fundamental Rule of Go

In the next few chapters, you will learn how a simple, single principle of capture generates a complex territorial game that has entranced millions of people for thousands of years.

To begin, the best way to think of a stone is that it is alive and is getting its qi energy from the lines of the board around it. Or think of the stone as needing to breathe. As in life, if you can’t breathe, you can’t live. If your opponent can completely surround you, you will suffocate, or, as the Chinese say, you are eaten. In Go terms, you have died and you must come off the board.

To give an example, here Black has placed a stone down and is now playing elsewhere on the board while White concentrates on taking just that one stone:

But there is much more to Go than simply eating and being eaten. For example, several stones together can form groups. If Black wants to save that stone . . .

By running away and escaping, what is now a Black group has become stronger. Think of the Black stones as being connected along the lines like beads on a string. The groups that are beginning to form in this way come in all shapes and sizes and they are the pieces that players use to play Go.

Here’s how White can capture a Black group—assuming Black doesn’t defend.

Black has nowhere to go:

In this example Black tries to avoid being captured:

Now it is a different story. Black is heading for more open areas, and this will make it much harder for White to capture. . . .

The Capturing Game

The idea of the capturing game was possibly how Go got its start, perhaps on a rainy day in a cave or temple in northern China thousands of years ago. A youngster might have drawn a sacred 9 line x 9 line board on the ground, put a stone on it, and said to a friend, The first person to capture a stone can keep it!

However, after a few games they might have discovered that even though capture can be an exciting game, getting just one stone at a time can be a little slow. It becomes much more interesting to try to see who can capture the most stones, and along the way, some very strange things start to happen.

Even if you don’t have a Go set, try a quick game with a friend using different colored beans or coins on a hand-drawn 9 x 9 board. In five minutes you will find you are playing real Go, watching how all the fascinating permutations of the game that baffle computers expand out of that simple, lifelike rule of capture. You will then discover why Go is called the encircling game ( Wei Qi Way-chee in Chinese): in good play, the empty intersections that your groups peacefully surround and control are much more important than the stones you capture.

But first a few hints. One thing you will quickly notice is that the sides and the corners can make things easier for you and more difficult for your opponent—or vice versa. They add a lot to the magic of Go because they can act like an extra teammate:

In the corner:

After playing a few capturing games, you’ll have a better understanding of the basic play. It will also give you a chance to begin thinking about the different ways stones can move and behave on the board.

Playing a Real Game

Let’s look at a capture game that was played between two beginners. They will make some mistakes (that we will look at after) but it illustrates the first of the higher concepts that will begin to appear on your Go board.

Black runs away with B7 and B9. . .

Then, with B11, Black’s attention turns to the White stone marked with a triangle. The White stone is in atari, meaning it is in danger of being captured on the next move. Somewhat like chess players saying check, it is polite for beginners to announce when they put their partner’s stone in atari because the situation is sometimes hard to see. As you and your opponents get better, however, unless you want to be helpful, it is not required.

Let’s see how the game continues:

White was in atari but was able to save things by running away with W12. Black is also running away but is running out of room as the group gets closer to the edge.

Black has a problem. Almost surrounded, the group has only two breathing spaces—or liberties as they say in the West—left at A and B. In other words, Black is one