• Teller
    27
    I'd be interested to know if anyone on TPF has followed recent articles about the game of Go and recent Chinese strategy, particularly in the South China Sea.

    Several of the pieces I have read are encouraging US military and intelligence officials to learn the game to gain insight into China's intentions

    Thoughts?
  • Banno
    23.1k
    Citations?
  • fdrake
    5.8k
    Every time there's a western - Asian conflict of some sort someone will always bring out the Chess vs Go strategy paradigm clickbait article. It was done with the Vietmin, it's being done now. The story goes that Chess playing nations think they win if they achieve "the key objective", Go playing nations think they win if they achieve "the greatest overall control". Over the years I've seen maybe... 4 or 5 news stories like that, and I don't remember any of them having any ounce of research in them. Just speculation and trope matching.
  • Ciceronianus
    2.9k
    Really, you know, they're just games. Wonderful games (chess I know is, Go I heard is), but games nonetheless.
  • Dogar
    30


    I would be curious in reading this too if you could link the original article OP.
  • tim wood
    8.7k
    Games can be suggestive of culture. Noted was that American games, for example, are cased in time, though baseball indirectly, consistent with western preoccupation with time and the now. Japanese Sumo, on the other hand, is about space, consistent with a population of about 130,000,000 on land smaller than California - a population itself not much less than Russia's and about 3.5 times that of Canada.

    Being a very indifferent chess player and a beginner-level go player, still I fear no contradiction if I observe that chess seems about speed and tactics, while go the strategy of taking and holding territory. Chess in mating - killing - the king, while in go there are no kings, nor queens, rooks, bishops or knights, but instead an inexhaustible supply of pawns - peasants.

    Nor is time a part of go, at least as it is in chess. And so forth. People who know go better can take this up. But Chinese culture does not come from go, but the other way 'round. And this is and has been more-or-less explicitly made clear by them, that they play the long strategic game. And we for the most part do not.
  • Teller
    27


    "Learning from the Stones": A Go Approach To Mastering China's Strategic Concept, SHI. David Lai, www.carslile.mil/ssi May 2004.

    Dated, but I believe accurate
  • Banno
    23.1k
    Anyone able to provide a link?
  • Hanover
    12k
    I recall several years ago (which is documented in the Wiki article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaGo#cite_note-latimes_milestone-66, which is a cite (sort of) as demanded by @Banno) that Go was thought of as too complex a challenge for AI programmers due to Go being a spatially based game with generalized principles. Chess, on the other hand, lent itself to mathematical number crunching, so it was something that could be deciphered by AI programmers.

    That theory held true until AI programmers began making Go programs that beat the top players, suggesting to me that the real reason Go AI programs lagged behind chess ones was likely due to commercial reasons in that there was more money in deciphering chess than Go.
  • opt-ae
    33
    War strategists can learn from chess or go, in the same way war strategists can learn from poker or a video game; recently Mark T Esper said "America will never lose it's ability to dare" - which I'm sure is a poker/gambling reference.

    I'd say collectively, every type of game, is only quart of the truth about war - and China is wrong to have suggested it should be thought like Go. War is not always played; war is like a performance, war is like a race, like food, etc. The best way to think about war logically is more about a mind-game than it is a man-made game; in theory, China played a bad mind-game here which will be easy to retaliate to, and it may end up problematic.
  • Ciceronianus
    2.9k
    https://fortune.com/2016/03/12/googles-go-computer-vs-human/

    Hanover is right (see link). And, as a chess player who has resented claims that computers can beat people at chess, but not at Go, I say to Go fans nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.
  • Banno
    23.1k
    Meh. Wife recently bought me Stratego, which has been played enthusiastically for a week or so. Unlike Chess, and more like life, there is no perfect strategy.

    Stratego AIs have only achieved mediocrity.
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