Watching the two guys in the coffee shop playing Go today, I was overcome with the urge to learn to play the game, and eventually (through hard work and many disappointments) to become proficient at it. This urge undoubtedly stems in part from my own personal history with the game: my dad and I used to play all the time when I was quite little, and more and more I’m remembering those things that we used to do together.
Of course, not unrelated is the fact that playing Go in a coffee shop with a Chinese guy is about as intellectual-hip as you can get. And let us not forget that at the time I was struck by this desire I was also struggling through a writing a draft of my Dharamsala research proposal, and when I am struggling through such uncomfortable tasks the strangest things become suddenly engrossing.
Although looking for distraction is surely part of the reason why I started thinking about Go, once I did I remembered how cool it is. I started poking around on the interwebs for stuff about Go and cognitive science, since as I remember it playing Go well is all about discerning form from masses of undifferentiated pieces, and should therefore be very interesting from a cognitive point of view. And, of course, I was not disappointed. While I didn’t want to get too distracted by a long, technical paper, I did read an interesting essay called “Go and the ‘Three Games’ “ about the complementary nature of Go, Chess and Backgammon and their correspondence to the three big narratives: man-vs-self, man-vs-society, and man-vs-nature. (The site linked to for the article has some other cool essays and also a place where you can play online).
In other news, despite the compulsion to voluntarily seek distraction I managed to (finally) pound out a real, honest-to-goodness draft of my research proposal and will probably be ready to send everything in this weekend. I finished my LISP assignment, and arranged my song for GQ in one marathon session. GQ is going wonderfully (as Matt points out). Music is getting learned at a tremendous rate, and we adore our new frosh. Till next time, folks!
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September 21, 2007 at 11:07 am
I have often had a similar inkling to try to learn to really play Go (you had to know that if you blogged about a game that I would respond ;-) ). I of course understand the rules, but to really play you have to study it. I’ve never been very good at hard-core complete information games so I am not sure if I will ever be a very good player. One anecdote on the cultural differences between the US and China – while on a business trip in China I noticed that there was a television program that aired quite frequently on tips and strategy for Go. It was interesting to watch, even though I could not understand the language –the intense enthusiasm the show’s host and the players had for this game was a striking contrast to the “reality” shown on American television.
October 8, 2007 at 4:38 pm
I think the hard-core total information thing is a good point…in my AI class right now we’re learning about general strategies for computers to play games like chess and checkers. In general, these strategies make decisions by exploring the tree of possible sequences of moves and counter-moves, and find the branch that looks the best based on some sort of heuristic evaluation function. Go is particularly difficult to approach this way because of the huge number of “branches” from each node (after 60 moves on a 19×19 board there are about 300 possible moves) and the difficulty in coming up with a good way to tell how “good” any given state is. As far as I know, Go is the only one of the ‘Three Games’ at which computers are not able to win against the best human players.
I suspect that the game is difficult for humans for the same reasons that it’s difficult for humans to teach computers how to play: to play at all effectively you have to conceptualize the state of the game in a probabilistic way at a very high level of abstraction while keeping track of the vast number of possible outcomes of any decision.