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acute sense of situation. Go concepts
such as “thickness” and “good flavor”
describe qualities of a match that reveal
a player’s “sense of the game”. Calcula-
tion is thinking, while sense is wisdom.
An outstanding player has to excel-
lently integrate these two.
It is very difficult to have an estimate
of the number of variations in Go. The
Arabian Nights has this story: Once,
when an Indian emperor wanted to re-
ward a certain man, that man said that
all he would like to have was as many
grains as would fill up the 64 grids of
an international chess board with the
first grid taking 1 grain, the second
taking 2 and so on, each grid taking a
number of grains that is the square of
the number of grains that the previous
grid had taken, until all the grids had
been filled. Considering this to be a
rather modest request, the emperor said
yes, only to find after calculation that
all the grains in his empire would not
suffice to meet the man’s request. The
number of variations in international
chess is truly remarkable, and yet the
Go game board is almost 6 times larger
than the international chessboard.
According to a calculation done by
North-Song dynasty (960-1127) math-
ematician Shen Kuo, the number of
Go variations should have roughly 768
digits. A 9-digit number meaning at
least a hundred million, a number with
768 digits is incomprehensible to the
human mind. In fact, the number is
actually far larger than this, because the
game allows ko fights and capturing of
stones and countless other maneuvers.
Indeed, “counting the number of Go
variations is as impossible as counting
the number of stars in the sky.”
In the 1990s, Deep Blue, an IBM
computer, was able to easily defeat
a world champion of international
chess. A million-dollar reward was then
posted for anyone who could develop
by the year 2000 a Go game computer
program that would be able to play the
world’s top professional players. Unfor-
tunately, to this day, 11 years after the
deadline, Go game computer programs
are still pitifully weak. The best of these
programs are only as good as 5-dan
professionals.
Thus, it has been said of Go: “No
two matches have ever been played
identically.” In the richness of its vari-
ations, Go is truly unparalleled among
all the world’s games of intelligence.
A philosophy of “round
Heaven, square Earth”
“A ferocious fistfight”, “The tem-
perature of the board reaches three
thousand degrees”, “The streams of
water are in no hurry to overtake each
other”, “hidden ambitions” … it would
be hard to imagine these phrases and
sentences being used to describe Go
maneuvers. Open up any Chinese Go
manual, and you will often find such
2010 年 CCTV 春节联欢晚会古典舞表演《对弈》。舞者身穿黑白两色舞服形象展示了中国围棋关于阴阳刚柔的哲学内涵。
A dance performance, “Playing Chess,”shown at the 2010 Spring Festival Gala. The dancers’costumes, in black andwhite, reflect the philosophical
implication of Chinese weiqi, Yin andYang, and tough and gentle.
文化博览
孔子学院
总第17期
2011
年
11
月 第
6
期