The art of Go
| By Shang Zuo The most popular and serious board games in China are chess and Go. Chinese chess is very similar to European chess. In both games, you have an army and a king, you command your army to destroy your enemy, and capture the rival king to win the game. The two games bear some differences too. For example, Chinese chess doesn't have a queen and moving castles. Instead, it has royal guards, artilleries and war chariots. And the king and his guards must stay in the "palace." It's not surprising that the two chess games resemble each other in many ways. They were both designed to simulate warfare. The fundamental ideas in them are the same. But the other game, Go, is in a whole different domain. Go originated in ancient China. It’s not certain when exactly Go was invented. The earliest reference of the game found today was written in the 4th century BC. The game took a thousand years to reach Japan and Korea, and another thousand years to spread to the whole world. The English name "Go" is a translation from Japan. I personally don't like the translation very much. Its original Chinese name "Weiqi" literally means "siege," which presents the gist of the game very well. Go gives me a feeling of mysteriousness, primitive yet delicate. I often feel Go has a deep philosophy in it. The game is played on a 19 X 19 grid. Imagine this grid is the universe in which we live. Unlike chess which uses kings and soldiers, Go only has black and white stones. Every one of them is equal. Imagine these stones are lives, are yin and yang. When a stone is placed on the board, in order to live, it must have space to “breathe.” A common intersection on the grid has four surrounding intersections (the intersections on borders and corners, of course, have fewer adjacent intersections). If all four points are possessed by opponent stones, the stone in the center is considered "dead," because it has no surrounding empty space to "breath." The dead stone should be removed from the board, leaving a new empty space for others. Isn't the game marvelous? It is lengthy to introduce Go's rules and objective without illustrations. In general, the rules of Go are perceived as very simple. Nevertheless, it's the most complicated board game in the world. The possible combinations of chess are somewhere between 1040 and 1045, while Go creates 10100 (1 followed by 100 zeros) combinations. Exhausting all possibilities by brute computing force helped Deep Blue, a super computer, defeat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. But Go's complexity makes it impossible to solve the game with today's computer technology. Ancient Chinese classified Go players by nine ranks. I don't know the formal translation of their titles. The best translations I came up with are: (from the lowest to the highest,) Conservation, Simplicity, Prowess, Finesse, Strategy, Enlightenment, Realization, Introversion, and Divinity. From the titles, one can tell that the game doesn't encourage skills and calculation, but appreciates vision and cultivation. Today, Japan, Korea and China have the best professional Go players in the world. Japan has a strong tradition of Go playing. Most of the greatest Go masters of the last century were from Japan. But nowadays, Japan's youth are attracted more to video games and other modern entertainment than the ancient board game. The country is lacking a young generation of Go players. The Koreans are playing a significant role. Lee Chang Ho, a world champion, is perhaps the strongest player of our time. Korean players are famous for their extreme calculation and accuracy. Even though Go originated in China, the country gradually lost its position to Japan and Korea in recent centuries. Public interest in Go was revived in the 1980s during a series of dramatic arena matches between China and Japan. Now the country is catching up quickly, and already has seven world champions. China has a Go league tournament, just like a sports league tournament. This is indeed an interesting way to train players and inspire public enthusiasm at the same time. If history can predict, as the country gets richer and recruits more young players, we will see more talent and more exciting games. That would be good news to all Go fans. |
