Go is one of the oldest and most popular strategic board games
in the world. It has been played in the China for more than 2,000
years. In Japan alone, 10 million people play go and nearly 400
professionals make their living by teaching the game and competing
in tournaments that offer tens of millions of yen in prize money.
Go is an easy game to learn. You can master the rules in a few
minutes, but you can devote a lifetime to exploring its depths and
subtleties.
Go starts with the simplest of materials and concepts - wood and
stone, line and circle, black and white. Yet complex strategies can
be devised that stagger the imagination. The game is so profound
that Asian executives use it as a paradigm for making business
decisions, generals have based their military campaigns on its
strategy, and politicians have espoused go principles in their
takeover of countries.
To some players, go is a model for living. Its strategic concepts
serve them as paradigms for decision- making in their daily lives.
Some of the more familiar maxims that are played out and illustrated
in nearly every game are: "Don't put all your eggs in one basket,''
"Don't burn your bridges behind you,'' "Look before you leap,''
"Don't bang your head against a stone wall,'' and "Don't throw good
money after bad.''
Go is comparable to chess. Both require high-level strategic
thinking and provide its players with many opportunities to exercise
their tactical skills. Both are challenging, intellectually
stimulating and inexhaustibly interesting.
But the similarities end there. Go starts with an empty board,
chess with a full one. The object of a go game is to surround more
territory than your opponent; the object of a chess game is to
capture your opponent's king. Go stones all have the same value;
chessmen have different values. Most, if not all, of the moves of a
go game remain on the board until the game ends, providing its
players with continuously developing shapes and patterns of black
and white stones; the beauty of a chess game's moves is more
ephemeral and kaleidoscopic as its patterns change with each move
and capture. Finally, computer programs now exist that can defeat
the strongest chess players in the world, but the strategies and
tactics of go are so profound that the best go-playing computer
programs are unable to defeat novice players.
In this column, I intend to show how go is played and to
introduce its historical background, the role it has played and
still plays in Asian culture, and what contributions it can make to
Western modes of thought. |