Go and science

Go (weiqi, baduk, igo) is a remarkable Chinese board game first played about 3000 years ago, although many believe it to be much older [1] . Those who’ve played the game all acknowledge its great depth. It truly encompasses the alpha and omega of strategy. Even if you haven’t played, perhaps you still know something about it.

Ever heard of Atari?

Of course you have! You may even be one of the lucky ones to have played the 2600 in the 1980s. Nolan Bushnell, the progenitor of the video game revolution, revered the game so much that he named his company after one of it’s most important positions. But do you know the origin of the word?

The Japanese, who advanced the study go, also added their own distinctiveness to the game. As a result many go terms used in the west derive from the Japanese language. “Atari” refers to a position in the game when a stone (or group of stones) is surrounded by enemy stones on all intersections, called liberties, bar one. This is shown below in the diagram on the right:

   You can clearly see where Bushnell’s inspiration comes from. But this is not an account of video game history. It’s about go and science. It’s about how pieces of slate and shell on a wooden board correlate to the principles of chemistry, physics, biology, neuroscience and mathematics.

There is something natural and rational in the patterns that form and grow on a go board in the course of play. The relationships between the groups of stones are complex, yet are built from simple underlying rules. It has been calculated that there are are 10768 possible games of go [2] i.e. a lot. It reminds me of Mr Spock’s maxim of IDIC;

Infinite diversity in infinite combinations [3]

I won’t make a futile attempt to go too deep into either go, or scientific explanation. I’ll leave that to the experts. I’m just perusing what seems (at least to my eyes) to be fundamental similarities in the patterns of the game of go and the basic laws of science. Many comparisons will be superficial and some may even embrace poetic license. However, during the course of my intensive (read: brief) research, I’ve encountered similar observations made by other go players and I’d like to include these with my own less percipient musings. The engineer Edward Lasker[4] who played both chess and go famously remarked;

The rules of go are so elegant, organic and rigorously logical that if intelligent life forms exist elsewhere in the universe they almost certainly play go.

Surely this points to the ubiquitous nature of game. Ancient Chinese philosophers compared the dimensions of the board to the cycles of nature. There are 360 intersections (plus one) on a go board representing the supreme position of “number one” which gives rise to all other numbers. Similarly, the Chinese lunar calendar comprises 360 days. The 72 points on the circumference of a go board correlate to the 5-day weeks of the same calendar (72 x 5= 360) and so on. Prior to this, go stones were even used by agriculturalists in divination practices to predict harvests.

So, what about go and modern science? Do the associations made in eons past still hold true in the age of recombinant DNA and buckyballs? This is the focus of my modest bid to explore some of the mysteries of go, the most enigmatic of games.

Yutopian Enterprises, 1999. History of Weiqi. (Online). Available at: http://www.yutopian.net/go/misc/gohistory.html (Accessed 17 August 2014).  ↩

Wikepedia, 2009. Go and mathematics. (Online). Available at: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_and_mathematics (Accessed 17 August 2014).  ↩

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