In a scene from the biopic about a brilliant, troubled mind, a Princeton classmate invites the mathematical genius to sit for a game of Go. The board is a complex lattice of 19 by 19 intersections, where players place black or white stones to claimed spaces and pursue bigger influence. At first glance the game may seem simple, but the branching possibilities explode with every move, creating patterns that can dazzle and overwhelm a human mind. In Go, the winning edge often comes from intuition and strategic feel as much as from raw calculation, a moment that crystallizes Nash’s unique blend of mathematical precision and narrative in the film.
Originating in China and later flourishing in Japan and Korea, Go is one of the world’s oldest board games, with a lineage that stretches back more than two and a half millennia. It predates many classic games and remains a pinnacle of strategic depth. Historically, it has been considered one of the four essential arts in ancient Chinese culture alongside music, calligraphy, and painting, a status that reflects its cultural weight and philosophical undertones.
Korean champion Lee Sedol
The story of Go resurfaced in popular imagination through contemporary literature and cinema. A notable recent work is the novel Maniac by the Chilean author Benjamín Labatut, which tracks the rise of physics and mathematics as they intersect with humanity’s capacity for destruction, from the earliest scientific revolutions to the Manhattan Project. Labatut also traces the career of the Hungarian mathematician John von Neumann, the father of computing, whose work laid groundwork for artificial intelligence that would later challenge human mastery in Go. The AI marvel AlphaGo, developed by the British firm DeepMind, defeated Go champion Lee Sedol in 2016, marking a watershed moment where machine reasoning met human ingenuity on a game board thought to be beyond computation.
This clash — the machine against the human mind — became a defining milestone. The victory underscored the idea that a program could move beyond brute force to exhibit a kind of strategic intuition, a blend of pattern recognition and deep planning that felt almost nonhuman. Exhibitions and documentaries have chronicled the event, highlighting the technical and philosophical dimensions of the match. A widely referenced exhibition titled Artificial Intelligence: AI at CCCB, which runs through March, features footage from Greg Kohs’ documentary AlphaGo and frames the achievement as a leap toward a level of understanding where humans and machines converge. The certification accompanying AlphaGo lauded its ability to grasp the underlying patterns of the game and approach a state of almost divine mastery. The takeaway is clear: Go’s timeless complexity pushed humanity to see the limits of computation and, more broadly, to rethink intelligence itself.
Labatut notes that even for casual players, the miracle is not simply about calculating moves. He concedes that he does not actually play Go, yet he emphasizes where the wonder lies: a program can be taught the rules of chess and beat the best human players through calculation alone, but Go requires something more nuanced. To train AlphaGo, developers fed the system hundreds of thousands of human matches to cultivate a practical intuition, then allowed it to practice against itself. The result is an algorithm that taps into a form of collective unconscious — a superhuman capacity that sometimes seems to edge toward a godlike level of play.
As complex as it is confusing
Go has long served as a well of metaphor. It tests a player’s character and invites aesthetic interpretation in every game. The film portrays it as a conduit to understand order within chaos, a way to glimpse a kind of divinity through systematic calculation. The idea of the game as a microcosm of the universe has appeared in cinema and literature alike, with Go cited as an emblem of universal patterns where no two games are ever alike. Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, for example, frames a similar tension: a seemingly simple system harbors infinite complexity, much like a snowflake or a unique constellation of moves on a board of black and white stones.
The comparisons extend beyond the world of fiction. Edward Lasker, a German-born American chess master who embraced Go in the early 20th century, contrasted the baroque rules of chess with the elegant logic of Go, imagining a form of intelligence that could only be discovered elsewhere in the universe. The idea resonates through science fiction as well, with authors like Ursula K. Le Guin and David Mitchell weaving Go into imagined futures and alternate histories. Go becomes a canvas for contemplating life, culture, and the human impulse to seek patterns in the apparent chaos of existence.
Japan and Borges
Go appears in daily Eastern culture and literature, but a particularly influential work is the Japanese author Yasunari Kawabata’s Master of Go. This 1951 novel dramatizes the six-month arc of a veteran player facing a younger challenger, using the game to explore the evolution of Japanese cultural identity and the rise of a more pragmatic approach to tradition. The narrative is less about winning than about the passage of time and the shifting tides of cultural norms, a reminder that games carry moral and existential weight beyond mere scores.
Jorge Luis Borges also crossed paths with Go in his literary universe. While travelling and exploring East Asian ideas, Borges reflected on the game as a symbol of complementarity and depth. In his poetry and prose, Go becomes a meditation on the cosmos: a board where black and white stones map a universe, and every move carries significance in a grand, almost metaphysical, design. The long arc of Go taps into cultural memory and philosophical inquiry, inviting readers to consider how simple rules can unlock immense complexity.