Dave Weimer reports that the April 25th to May 1st issue of The Economist includes an obituary for mathematician John Horton Conway on page 82, who died at age 82. He taught at Cambridge and Princeton, and was famous for inventing the Game of Life, which was widely played after it was published in Scientific American in 1970. He discovered “surreal numbers” and made contributions to a variety of fields in mathematics. “He seems to have been a bit eccentric,” says Weimer. “The following passage caught my attention: ‘Or, ensconced in some hallway nook, he would just observe a game. It had been while watching Go players that he realized each game contained many sub-games; and this had led him, first, to surreal numbers, and second to the light-bulb thought that playing games was not a distraction from mathematics. It was mathematics.'”
The obituary for Philip Anderson, a Nobel prize winning physicist, appeared in the New York Times March after his death on Sunday at the age of 96, report E-Journal readers Dan Kastenholz and Larry Russ. Anderson was a professor at Princeton University and consultant at Bell Labs in New Jersey, which had an active Go scene in the 60s and 70s. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1977, and his obituary – authored by Scott Veale – ends with a mention of his being a “first degree master of the Japanese board game Go.” An anecdote describes a conversation Anderson had with economist W. Brian Arthur in the 1990s: “‘Well, I play a bit of Go,’ he said,” Professor Arthur recalled. “I pressed him. ‘Are you any good at it, Phil?’ ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘How good?’ ‘Well, there are four people in Japan who can beat me.’ Then a long silence. ‘But they meditate,’ he added.”
Carol Geary reports that in the latest episode – Episode 5 – of Devs, a drama miniseries available on Hulu, one of the main characters flashes back to her childhood playing Go with her father. The series stars Sonoya Mizuno as Lily, the character in the flashback, and Nick Offerman as her employer at a tech company called Amaya with a mysterious quantum computing division called Devs.
This month, Smithsonian Magazine published an article called Great Board Games of the Ancient World; naturally Go is included, though towards the end of the article, along with Mancala, Senet, the Royal Game of Ur, Mehen, Backgammon, the Game of the Goose, and others. Thanks to Steve Zilber for spotting this article.
Go was part of the February 8-9 grand re-opening of the Seattle Asian Art Museum, following a $56 million renovation of the 1933 art-deco building. On prominent display was a large Chinese decorative screen (artist uncertain) featuring the four classical arts required of aristocratic gentlemen: playing the guqin (a stringed zither-like instrument), calligraphy, painting, and playing go (right). Thanks to Steve Jones, South Sound Go Club, Tacoma WA.
“In Lecture 24 of her course Brain Myths Exploded (available at The Great Courses.com) entitled Does Technology Make You Stupid? Indre Viskontas uses Go to support her thesis that the answer to the title question is no,” writes Joel Sanet. “After spending about a minute and a half (at minute 23) describing Go in which she calls it ‘the most complex game ever devised by our species’ and ‘the pinnacle of human intelligence,'” she points out AlphaGo’s defeat of Lee Sedol. However, in defense of her position she also mentions Fan Hui’s statement that playing against AlphaGo has made him a better Go player.”
How AI could change science “This interesting article about AI and its applications from the University of Chicago uses AlphaGo as an example,” writesAlicia Seifrid. “For example, when someone programmed the rules for the game of Go into an AI, it invented strategies never seen in thousands of years of humans playing the game,” said Brian Nord, an associate scientist in the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics and UChicago-affiliated Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory. “Maybe sometimes it will have more interesting ideas than we have.”
9 Dan Girl “Bold and strong-willed Yu Ruiwen makes it her lifelong challenge to prove her worth of playing Go” in the 9 Dan Girl manga by Yoshinori Kisaragi, Ri Yin Quing Kong and Bai Ri. “The story of a girl building an outstanding winning history in a game dominated by men,” says Manga Rock. “None of the action of Hikaru and only 15 chapters up so far,” David Bogie. “Translation is a bit crude.” Also available here.
A Wise Man’s Fear “In the second book of “The Kingkiller Chronicles,” by Patrick Rothfuss, I think called “A Wise Man’s Fear,” they play a game with stones,” writes Eli Strongheart. “They aim to play a beautiful game. I’m fairly certain its Go.”
In a September 7th article titled “Battle algorithm,” The Economist writes of a “paradox” that may be familiar to readers who analyze their games using Leela Zero and other AIs. “AI might at once penetrate and thicken the fog of war, allowing it to be waged with a speed and complexity that renders it essentially opaque to humans.” The article notes that in AlphaGo’s March 2016 victory over Lee Sedol, the AI “played several highly creative moves that confounded experts,” and this led a workshop at the Chinese Academy of Military Science to conclude that, in the words of one source, “an AI could create tactics and stratagems superior to those of a human player in a game that can be compared to a war-game.”
While the article in The Economist focuses on conventional warfare, the strengths and weaknesses of go-playing AIs also appear in recent publications on nuclear warfare.
In 2017, the American think tank RAND Corporation held a series of workshops on AI and nuclear war, which noted that AlphaGo’s victory “astonished even AI and strategy experts.” “[T]he decisionmaking in Go is far simpler to address than in nuclear war…. but by the year 2040, it does not seem unreasonable to expect that an AI system might be able to play aspects or stages of military wargames or exercises at superhuman levels.” It is “likely that humans making command decisions will treat the AI system’s suggestions as on par with or better than those of human advisers. This potentially unjustified trust presents new risks that must be considered.”
This year, an August 16 commentary by two American researchers also cites AlphaGo. The commentary notes that AlphaGo Zero “learned through an iterative process”; “in nuclear conflict there is no iterative learning process.” “The laws of war require a series of judgments…. Software that cannot explain why a target was chosen probably cannot abide by those laws. Even if it can, humans might mistrust a decision aid that could outwardly resemble a Magic 8-Ball.” Nonetheless, the commentary argues for having AI take more control over US nuclear weapons.
Thanks to Fred Baldwin for once again spotting go, this time in “Battle algorithm.”
A couple of AGA members have recently told us about references to games with stones in science fiction novels. Could these folks be playing Go?
Peter Freedman points out that in the science fiction trilogy Chronicle of the Unhewn Throne by Brian Staveley, the warriors play “a game of stones” with black and white stones. Unfortunately, we have no more information about this.
Meanwhile, Mike Goerss points out that in Machineries of Empire by Yoon Ha Lee, another science fiction trilogy, the characters play a game called “pattern stones” that seems like it could possibly be Go. Few details about this game are provided, but there is a reference to a three-stone handicap, and also the line, “Brezan placed a black stone – naturally he was the weaker player.” (These references appear on pages 152-154 of Raven Stratagem, the second book in the series.)
If you find more clues about what game these characters are playing, or if you spot references to Go in other popular literature, please let us know by dropping us a line at journal@usgo.org.
“During Go Congress, I visited the Chazen Museum of Art at UW and found this Japanese print,” writes Li Ping. “It is a Samurai standing on top of a Go set.”
The woodcut is by Katsukawa Shunshô, who was known for “his widely influential nise-e (“likeness painting”) or nigao (“likenesses”), which were stylized but otherwise accurate facial likenesses of actors. These introduced a greater measure of realism and individuation into ukiyo-e actor portraits.” (Source.)
Katsukawa Shunsho
(Japanese, 1726 – 1792)
“The Actor Ichikawa Danjuro V as a Samurai in a Wrestling Arena”
ca. 1780
Color woodcut
Bequest of John H. Van Vleck
