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by Jesse Chao
2d
July 25, 2005
My attraction to go began
during childhood. The seemingly simple game of black and white stones laid over
a grid seemed conquerable, even to a small child. Today, I find myself as
spellbound over the endless strategies of the deceptively unadorned game as I
was ten years ago. During that time, go has become not just a pastime, but also
a form of art and meditation. The game expects nothing more or less than a
capacious imagination. Just as I love to explore the tangible realm of the
sciences, go requires the precision of a chemist and reasoning of a
mathematician. Just as I am split between the humanities and the sciences, the
game demands the essence of both.
Artificial intelligence fascinates
me, and the technical game play of go is much like a computer's binary system.
Yet, despite the millions in prizes offered for a computer program that can
match a professional player's strength, the strongest computer go program in the
world is still at the mercy of a novice go player. Why can Deep Blue outplay
chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov, while a go program with similar processing
capacity falls so much shorter against a weak go player? One possibility is that
the plays in go are more open-ended; although moves must be accompanied by solid
logic there is often no definitive answer. This seems to pose a paradox,
especially since logic is supposed to be able to solve a problem with a
straight, unquestionable answer. I can easily see how go's complexity
contributed to John Nash's inspiration for in formulating his "Nash Equilibrium"
branch of Game Theory. Nash's theorem has led me to explore the perfect logic
that governs so many aspects of life that I once thought were unsystematic.
However, while the Equilibrium
Theory has taken an emotionally exclusive, mathematical view towards life and
game, I believe that there may well be an illogic that governs all logic. In my
own play, I have often felt compelled by pure emotion to play a move, against
all rationality. Only later would it turn out to be a good play, unexplainable
in its efficacy, yet eerily appropriate.
Go is just a game. However, the
nature of the game allows it to provide a window into everyday situations. The
choices made in a simple game turn out to be deeply representative of one's true
character. When I play go, I am offered a window into another's complete spirit,
and my own nature becomes transparent. The game offers deep meditation, and the
emotional expression unites with rational analysis to ru b my mind like a
genie's lamp, releasing my thinking from the world about me. It is why I play
go.
19-year old Jesse Chao was
the 1997 Redmond Cup Champion and is now a sophomore at Stanford University,
where he's majoring in Human Biology.
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