In a scene from the movie‘A magnificent mind’ Biographical film about the eventful life of a genius and schizophrenic mathematician John Forbes Nashembodied by Russell Crowe, A classmate from Princeton invites him to play To gogame of stones and whites played on a board 19 X 19 square and you just need to place white or black pieces at the intersections to try to occupy the most space on that little wooden battlefield and win the game. At first it may seem that the game is very easy, and in fact the rules that govern it are, but the number of mathematical possibilities that open up when placing a tile is so great that the resulting figure is unimaginable to a human. Additionally, the winner in Go is usually not the person who calculates the most, but rather the person with the best intuition, which is why Nash’s pure and simple mathematical genius hits the game at that moment in the movie. .
Originating in China but also practiced in Japan and Korea, Go was born at the same time as Go, more than 2,500 years ago. chair, abacus, printed papyrus scroll, and Giza pyramids and it is the oldest game in existence, much older even than chess, and is still largely unknown, although there are periodic reports accompanying some movies or novels as synonymous with mathematical complexity in the West, where it is not as popular. From here. The nobles of the ancient Chinese are considered as: one of the four basic arts as well as music, calligraphy and drawing.
Korean champion Lee Sedol
The game’s last visit to our imagination came from one of the star books from earlier this year. ‘MANIAC’, a novel by Chilean author Benjamín Labatut He described the transition of science from the birth of Physics and Mathematics to the service of the destructive power of the Nazis, which brought about another destruction no less shocking in the atomic bomb, which was the result of the Manhattan Project. Labatut then follows the Hungarian mathematician’s career in his novel. John Von Neumann -there are readers on the networks who claim that they prefer Labatut’s book to the Oscar-winning film ‘Oppenheimer’-, the father of computers and the creator of a groundbreaking machine over the years Go AlphaArtificial Intelligence created by British company Deep Mind that defeated Korean go champion Lee Sedol in 2016.
This was the last and definitive great struggle of the machine against man through a game that had hitherto been considered invincible for a computer; He won chess against Kasparov in 1996, 20 years ago. As the explanatory exhibit shows, the duel was monumental and dazzling.Artificial Intelligence: ‘Artificial Intelligence’ at CCCBOpen until March and featuring footage from Greg Kohs’ canonical documentary on this milestone, ‘Alpha Go’, which can also be viewed on YouTube. The certification, which gave the AI its highest distinction, stated that Alpha Go “strives to master the Taoist foundations of the game” and has succeeded. A level “close to divinity”. We have been playing Go for thousands of years and only then, thanks to a machine, did we realize the incomprehensibility of the game. We knew almost nothing about him.
Like Alpha Go programmers, amateur players who barely know the basic rules of the game, Labatut admits he doesn’t know how to play Go, but that doesn’t exempt him from pinpointing where the “miracle” as he describes it lies. : “You can teach the software the rules of chess and it can beat the best player just by mathematical calculation. However, it was necessary to act in a completely different way in go, where the opponents got carried away by emotion and claimed to place the stone. So the machine was taught how to play by entering 500,000 amateur games, which gave it a kind of common sense, and then it started playing the machine itself. The result is an algorithm of our unconscious. They then eliminated common sense, meaning they eliminated humanity, and the systems derived from Alpha Go became superhuman, god level”.
As complex as it is confusing
It’s no surprise that Go is an inexhaustible source of metaphors. It serves to show the player’s character, and experts can interpret an aesthetic and poetic meaning in each game. And as can be seen, it was used as a tool to turn to God. Doing this through mathematical calculation is already a first-rate literary trope. What the film’s mathematician hero seeks is to organize chaos as a way to see divinity.Pi’ (1998), debut Darren Aronofsky, It is a complex and confusing system that tries to dissuade the teacher from this effort, thanks to the Go board, which he describes as the “micro system of the universe”, which looks simple and orderly, but in reality, games like snowflakes and “no two are alike”.
It could also be a game of aliens. Edward Lasker The German chess grandmaster, who emigrated to the United States during World War I and was one of the few Western practitioners of Go in the early 20th century, compared the baroque rules of chess, which “could only have been created by humans,” with those of Go. . , “so elegant, organic and perfectly logical If there were other forms of life elsewhere in the universe “I’m sure they will play Go.” You must have thought something about this. Ursula K. Le Guin He took the game there in Winter, the imaginary planet inhabited by mutant hermaphrodites in his basic novel ‘The Left Hand of Darkness’. On the other hand, it is a game that survives in the science fiction genre due to its highly speculative nature, and we find it that way.Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell And ‘‘paper zoo’ Written by Chinese American Ken Liu without forgetting his epic ‘wheel of time Started by Robert Jordan and completed by Brandon Sanderson.
Japan and Borges
Naturally, go appears as a daily and widespread entertainment in all Eastern literature. But perhaps the book that appealed to him the most was ‘‘Master of Go’ your reward Japanese Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata, a 1951 fictional history of the agonizing game over six months in which veteran player Honinbo Shusai lost to young prospect Kitani Minoru in 1938, with Kawabata reporting as a journalist. The book follows all the movements of the game, but what it really means is the death of the traditional vision of Japanese culture and the emergence of a new, more pragmatic style that has yet to be explored.
We can’t forget Jorge Luis Borges either. He is no stranger to the fact that his partner María Kodama, a great lover of Japanese literature, has Japanese roots. The Argentinian claimed that he first visited the country he had admired since childhood in the 70s and fell in love with a Japanese screen in his family’s house. She came from that journey,’GoOne of the poems that make up the book ‘Password’, the significance of which the author knew how to capture. “Today, September 9, 1978, / in the palm of my hand there was a disk smaller than three hundred and sixty-one disks / necessary for the astrological game of Go / for the other chess of the East. / It is older than the oldest writing / and the board is a map of the universe. / Black and white varieties / will expire.”