American Go E-Journal » China

“When a nation’s fortunes rise or fall, so too do its fortunes in Go.” That’s from “Why Chinese players of Go aren’t winning any more” in the Nov. 12 issue of The Economist, quoting Marshal Chen Yi, a go-playing soldier in China’s civil war. The column notes that after decades of dominating the go world, “Chinese players have been losing more than they have been winning.” Things reached a new low this month when not a single Chinese player qualified for the Samsung Fire Cup. Some – including the EJ’s own Stephen Hu — say it’s because Chinese players have not embraced AI as much as other international players, while others say the strict covid lockdown in China has prevented elite Chinese players from competing in the weekly domestic tournaments that provided invaluable experience. The lockdowns have also made it harder for China’s national team to meet to analyze opponents’ styles. “It has been very difficult for us to do intensive training,” team coach Yu Bin told The Economist.  

Thanks to Dave Weimer for passing this along. Send your go-spottings to us at journal@usgo.org

The proposed exhibition “A Contemporary Art Experiment, From Go Seigen to AlphaGo” has been selected as the winning exhibition for the 2021 OCAT Research-Based Curatorial Project, “ at the OCAT Research Center in Beijing. The selection “means we get to stage another, bigger exhibition for the next stage with the entire museum space at our disposal later this year,” reports Zhiyan Yang, who will curate the show with Chen Jiayi.

“We were happy to be one of the ‘Artists’ providing materials,” says AGF President Terry Benson, who along with longtime AGAers Roy Laird and Barbara Calhoun recorded some Silly Go Songs showing the broader cultural of Go in the west. Some of the old covers of the American Go Journal (below) were also included.

A total of 29 proposals were initially made, with a resulting shortlist of five, including “The Flow of Broken Mirrors: Rewriting ‘Modernity’ in Perception of Boundaries,” “Why Everything Has Not Disappeared,” “The Fragile and Dangerous Domain of Optimism – Redefinition and Reproduction of Failure,” “Algorithms: The Magician of Exhibition Knowledge Production” and the winner, “Go, A Contemporary Art Research Experiment – From Wu Qingyuan to AlphaGo” which “explores how go, as an ‘old media’ and a rearguard culture in the contemporary context, transcends its own attributes as a game, and produces more diversity in the process of blending with cultural practice and artistic creation.” CLICK HERE for a walk-through of the exhibit featuring the five finalist projects.

An expanded exhibition – with more materials from the AGA – will be mounted in Beijing later this year.

The Chinese Weiqi Association on March 15 suspended Liu Ruizhi from attending competitions overseas for a year after he violated the “no use of AI” rules when participating in a national chess competition earlier that day. According to the statement, Liu Ruizhi used an AI program during the first round of the Chinese professional Go Championship preliminaries, and his supervisors did not fulfill their supervisory responsibilities. According to the rules of the competition, the use of AI is strictly prohibited, and players who break this rule will be banned for one year. If the player is a member of the national training team, they will be expelled from the team immediately.

Zuo Shiquan, head of the equipment manufacturing research institute under the China Center for Information Industry Development, told the Global Times on Wednesday that AI can guide a player by calculating the next step after analyzing the historical data of contestants input in advance and that this counts as cheating during a match.

Liu Ruizhi was born in 1996; his career began in 2019, but he had not won any major matches during his career, the Xinhua News Agency reported.

The Chinese Professional Go Championship is a professional tournament with the longest history and the largest participation in China. A total of 231 people signed up for the competition – a new record – of which 194 participated in the preliminaries.

– adapted from a report by Chen Xi in the Global Times