American Go E-Journal » Go Spotting

A recent article on the Business Insider website extols the mathematical benefits of the game of go, which is the 6th of 13 Things That You Can Do To Make Your Child A Genius At Math.

The article asked professional mathematicians what got them started in math. ”There is no better way to train your brain, said one respondent, than the game [of] Go.”

Can you tell who is ahead in the go position that the article displays?  (Assume Black to play and a komi of 6.5.)  The full article appears here. Thanks to Chris Sira for sending the link.

An article in the May 23 issue of the magazine Foreign Policy entitled “Pulp Liberation Army” surveys the strange and terrifying underground world of Chinese military fantasy novels. One such novel, 2066: Red Star Over America, “portrays the United States in the throes of a Cultural Revolution, where bands of marauding U.S. students fight battles in the country’s ravaged countryside. China is the world’s top superpower, and an earthquake has sunk Japan, erasing it from the map. The protagonist, a Chinese Go player and diplomatic envoy, tries to return civilization to a crumbling United States.” Go player to the rescue! Read the full article here. Thank you Matthew Curran for sharing this.

“The heavyweight pros on late-night cable television boast nicknames such as Monster, Razor, Butcher, Assassin and Knitting Needle. The most famed matches in history include the Blood Vomiting Game of 1835, the Famous Killing Game of 1926 and the Atomic Bomb Game of 1945. No, this is not some bone-crushing contact sport. It is a simple parlour game where two opponents, comfortably seated and often equipped with nothing more than folding paper fans and cigarettes, take turns placing little stones, some black, some white, on a flat wooden grid…”
- excerpted from the December 16, 2004 report  on “The most intellectually testing game ever devised?” in The Economist; thanks to Glen Peters for passing it along. Photo Getty Images, courtesy The Economist

The most recent episode of Da Vinci’s Demons  “The Prisoner” (Episode 3) — is structured to parallel a game of go, played by Riario and the eponymous, mysterious prisoner.  ”The villain forces a prisoner to teach him go,” reports EJ reader Diego F. Pierrottet. “The villain then uses the go strategy and philosophy that he is learning against his enemies, in this case DaVinci’s employer and DaVinci himself.” The series airs Friday nights at 9 pm on Starz.
- Dave Weimer

“At the 1:10:00 minute mark of ‘Detective Dee and the Mystery of the Phantom Flame’ there is a beautiful scene with an elaborate goban and stones,” writes Vincent DiMattia. I don’t know if this has been reported before but (even if so), watch the movie for it’s great production and story line. It’s filled with mystery and magic and is top quality. Fight scenes are impressive also.”
Read more about this in our October 22, 2011 post: Go Spotting: The Mystery of Detective Dee and the Go Board.

“I found this in an old manga called Vagabond which follows the swordsman Miyamoto Musashi,” writes Taylor Litteral. It was in Volume 6, chapter 50, page 6.