[FRIAM] Plaing Go With Darwin

[jon zingale]

The famous games between Shusai and Kitani were later fictionalized by
Kawabata
in his classic work *The Master of Go*. The style of the prose and the
attention
to necessary detail draw upon Kawabata's masterful ability as a journalist.
He delicately reports on Shusai's corrupt and petty nature, his austere home
life, while chronicling the tragic descent of a man unwilling to allow the
next
generation to take its rightful place. I speculate that the severity of his
critique was part of the motivation for *fictionalizing* the story.

The article briefly touches on the combinatorial nature of the game but
misses
to emphasize one of my favorite differences relative to chess. In chess, the
pieces are pre-defined, while in go one builds *shape* stone by stone. In
chess,
a bishop or a queen is exactly a bishop or a queen, while in go the
*meaning* of
a shape is subject to constant change. I very much like David's comparison
of thickness to "establishment of robust phenotype", aji to latent variation
(though this last metaphor misses the "fishy" or "dank" interpretation of
the
word aji.

When describing the goals of the game to beginners or the uninitiated, I
tend
to steer away from the *capture* aspect of the game. It always seems
misleading.
While capture is a mechanic in the game, many games are played without a
single
explicit capture and many can be played without any capture. The metaphor I
prefer is one of two plants in the same pot. Sometimes one will grow such
that
another's roots will wither or die, but both plants will likely live, just
one
a little better than the other. The possibility of a *peaceful* game is one
of the
more interesting qualities of go.

One night, a few winter's ago, I ran into David at one of our Santa Fe go
club
meetings at the Violet Crown. He watched my buddy Max and I play a game, and
the three of us chatted go. Shortly after, he acquired a go board for the
institute.
Unfortunately, there wasn't really anyone besides myself who really played.
I did get to have a really good game in the library with NYU's Frank Lantz.
I very much look forward to a post-pandemic world where I can have beers
with friends while throwing stones on a board.



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