American Go E-Journal » Go Spotting

The Highbrow Game: Go is classified as a “high-brow” game in a chart detailing “the best and worst of art and popular culture,” in a 1949 issue of LIFE magazine, reports Molly Fitzpatrick on nerve.com .  “Looking at the other classifications, I am unsure whether it’s a compliment or not,” says EJ reader Garrett Bredell, who sent us the link. “But nice to see it mentioned anyway.”

An Unlikely Place: “My father spotted a go reference in a very unlikely place!” writes Alicia Seifrid. “An opinion article by Bob Pinato  in the latest issue of Microwave Product Digest spoke about the current world political situation, and it mentioned go in reference to China’s recent policy of claiming of nearby islands.  The author likened this to a real-life version of ‘GO, the ancient Asian game of power and strategy.’”

Northeastern University alumnus Gordon Castanza sent along this Northeastern University Magazine from January 2002, which features go on the cover to illustrate a story by Katy Kramer about “The modern relevance (and strange seductiveness) of a very ancient game.'” Unfortunately, we didn’t get a copy of the actual story, so if anyone’s got it, please scan and send to us at journal@usgo.org

Go was used to graphically illustrate a Harvard Business Review blog post on how to “Develop Strategic Thinkers Throughout Your Organization,” earlier this year. While go is not directly referenced in the post, author Robert Kabacoff says that “Strategic leaders take a broad, long-range approach to problem-solving and decision-making that involves objective analysis, thinking ahead, and planning.” One commenter does suggest that “strategy games might be best” to practice strategic thinking, “something like Chess, Go (in picture above), or even Starcraft are all fantastic (best is chess, imo).”
Thanks to Roy Laird for passing this along.

“Beating the Game of Go” is the title of a recent Physics Central Podcast. “Researchers in France want to model the game as a complex network. Other examples of complex networks include airplane flight plans, social networks, neurons in the brain, and fungal communities, to name a few. By modeling Go as a complex network, the researchers hope to find patterns and symmetries that could assist scientists who are working on Go-playing programs, that they hope will some day beat the best human Go players (something that already been accomplished in Chess).” The report also has a number of interesting and useful go links.

“It is a very random show, but this episode of Tonari no Seki-kun features go. Sort of,” reports Joseph Cua. “‘Don’t lose to your shadow!’ Pretty funny.”

People who like disco music may also like the game of go – if  Swede Chris Linn’s 1980 recording, The Game of Go (B-side to Santa Monica Blue Waves) was on the money. The song, whose chorus is: “Let’s play the game of go”, features such lyrics as:

Though you give me three stones,

I have to fight like mad;

You seem to catch up so easily

From the disadvantage that you had

as well as the hookline, Atari! Atari!

– all to a disco beat. Perhaps a Japanese-speaking reader can translate the spoken section halfway through.

Click here to boogie on down to Chris’s groove on Youtube.

Tony Collman, British correspondent for the E-Journal. Thanks to spotter Phil Smith, who says (with perhaps just a touch of British irony), “Can’t think why this wasn’t more popular….”; photo courtesy of Discogs.