A Short History of Go
"Gentlemen should not waste their time on trivial games -- they should study go."
-Confucius, The Analects, ca. 500 B.C.E. Weiqi in China
Go is a traditional board game coming from ancient China. It is now widely played in Japan, China, and Korea and has been ingrained in their cultures for many centuries. In China, where it is called wéiqí (圍棋), it is traditionally considered one of the four arts of the scholar (collectively called 琴棋書畫, qín-qí-shū-huà) alongside the playing of the guqin (琴, qín), which is a seven-stringed zither, calligraphy (書, shū), and painting (畫, huà). wéiqí means "surrounding board game" in Chinese. The earliest record of its existence is in Zuo Zhuan, circa 4th century BC. It was also referenced to in Book XVII of the Analects of Confucius as well as in other early literature. There are a number of tales on its origin, but I will only tell one of these here. There was a certain emperor of China named Yao who ruled between 2356 and 2255 BC, that is, 99 years. With a board of mulberry wood and ivory pieces, he invented wéiqí for the benefit of his eldest son, Danzhu, who was not a bright child, but liked to play. Danzhu learned the game well, but was eventually banished to Danshui because of his viscous temper. (Lihui Yang, Handbook of Chinese Mythology (Santa Barbara CA: ABC-CLIO, 2005), 228.) In modern times, go is played with an empty board before the first move is made. This convention came from Japan and was soon adopted by both China and Korea, and opening theory was developed. However, in ancient China and Korea, stones were placed in a standard formation to begin the game. In China, this was a simple crossed opening with two stones of each color placed on the 4-4 points of each corner. Confucius played the game. He was Until recently, the women's division of professional players under the Chinese Weiqi Association was not allowed to compete with the men's division. In this time, there was a certain player named Rui Naiwei. |
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Igo in Japan
The game is thought to have reached Japan by the 7th century. There, it is called "igo" (囲碁, いご), or simply "go" (碁, ご), the name which many Western nations adopted. For many years, Japan was the cultural center for go. During the Edo Period (1603-1868), the study of the game flourished with the establishment in 1612 of the four go houses of Hon'inbo, Hayashi, Inoue, and Yasui which regularly competed in the presence of the shogun in "castle games," or oshirogo. Each year, the top player would go on to serve as the godokoro, who would personally teach the shogun and care for other affairs concerning go. These schools lasted until soon after the fall of the Tokugawa shogunate in 1868 and followed the Iemoto system of handing down a tradition in a tightly-knit hierarchy. Many of their game records survive today and can be studied by modern players. In this time, there was a certain player named Kuwabara Torajiro. Today, he is better known as Hon'inbo Shusaku. He studied in the Hon'inbo school, the strongest of the four go schools. He has been called a kisei, a "go sage," alongside Hon'inbos Dosaku and Jowa (the latter's title was removed after his death because of a scandal). Shusaku is known well for a game he played when he was 17 against Inoue Gennan Inseki, a man in his fifties, the head of the Inoue go house, and perhaps the strongest player of his time. Gennan initially gave Shusaku a two-stone handicap, but insisted on moving to an even game after seeing his strength. In this game, Gennan, who had White, played a new variation on the very complicated taisha joseki (large slant corner pattern) and Shusaku, not knowing it well, answered it incorrectly. From here, he began to fall behind. However, at move 127, Shusaku, playing Black, placed a stone near the center point. At this moment, although none of Gennan's students who were watching the game suspected it, an onlooking doctor noticed that Gennan's ear began to turn red, and then he knew that Gennan was losing. This move, now called "the ear-reddening move," performed many functions: it expanded Shusaku's framework of territory to the top, removed some of White's strength to the right, helped link a distant group engulfed by White to the bottom, and threatened White's territorial framework to the left. After all was played and done, Shusaku won by two points. At the age of 33, Hon'inbo Shusaku died of a cholera epidemic which swept across Japan after caring for those who were sickened by it. His name lives on in the Shusaku fuseki (opening), which he developed. It remained the most popular opening for Black for nearly a century, until the introduction of komi (first-move compensation points) for White in the 1930's. Because of Japan's great development of go, in the past, young budding players from China and Korea would go there to live and train under strong Japanese players. Go Seigen was one of these. He was born in China in 1914 under the name Wu Qingyuan, but moved to Japan at the age of 14 to study go. By some, he is said to have been the greatest player of the 20th century. He and Kitani Minoru developed the shin fuseki, a new opening style which stressed influence across the board over secure territory, and as such, the two are regarded as fathers of modern go.
In 1933, Go Seigen played against Hon'inbo Shusai, the head of the Hon'inbo go house, in one of the most famous games of the 20th century, which is now called "the game of the century." It is a pristine example of the new shin fuseki style of Go Seigen and Kitani Minoru against the traditional style of the go masters of the past. After defeating Minoru and Hashimoto Utaro, Go Seigen, then 20 years old, advanced to play against Hon’inbo Shusai. The Hon’inbo had not played an official match in nearly 10 years. Go Seigen played Black and Hon’inbo Shusai had White, and both players had 24 hours of time to think. Under the match rules, the player holding White (Shusai) was allowed to suspend the game at any point without making a sealed move (a move written in secret and sealed in an envelope when a match is paused for the purpose of being revealed only when the game is resumed for fair play). It is almost universally reported that during these periods of adjournment, Hon’inbo Shusai would retreat to his home and study the game with his students, the Hon'inbo house. He did this a total of 13 times, all on his move, causing the game to drag on for three months into the Febuary of the next year. Meanwhile, because of Go's status as a foreigner in Japan, he was the object of much harrasment at this time, and the windows of his home were broken in during the course of the match. Go played very unusual moves in the opening which broke away from Shusaku's traditional opening in favor of an influence-oriented game in the shin fuseki style. This led some to say that he was insulting the Hon'inbo with his remarkable play. Now, after four battles within the game, it was very close. On the 13th day of the match, Hon’inbo Shusai played a brilliant move at H8 and he managed to win by 2 points. However, it was rumored that it was Maeda Nobuaki, a student of Hon’inbo Shusai, and not the Hon’inbo himself who had authored the winning move. After the match, Maeda, when asked about the rumor, declined neither to confirm it nor to deny it. 5 years after this match, Hon’inbo Shusai played his retirement game against Kitani Minoru, who was a good friend of Go Seigen and his fellow innovator of the shin fuseki. In his game, Kitani requested that there should be a sealed move whenever the game was to be adjourned. This was accepted after some opposition from Shusai’s supporters, and Kitani won by a comfortable margin of 5 points. The match was the basis of the book, The Master of Go, by the Nobel laurete, Yasunari Kawabata. Go Seigen died in 2014 at the age of 100. He is the subject of a documentary and has written a number of books on go. It was from Japan where the game spread to the West. Much of the literature available at the time was written in Japanese, so Japanese terms were adopted, and that is why we as Americans say "atari" when a group is one move away from capture and why we call a knight's L-shaped move a "keima." Although Japan is no longer the dominant power in the world of go, as Italian is to music, Japanese is a lingua franca to go in the Western world, where the game will hopefully grow. |
Baduk in Korea
In Korea, the third "kingdom of go," the game is called "baduk." This name's etymology is uncertain, but a few guesses render "a flat and wide board," "field (and) stone," or that it was a loan word from the Chinese páizi (排子) meaning "to arrange pieces." The game probably arrived in Korea within the 5th and 7th centuries. With the rise of Korean players like Cho Hun-hyeon and Lee Chang-ho, go's popularity has surged in South Korea and remains a classic pastime among old men by the rivers. In the March of 2016, the long race for a computer to topple a reigning human in go had been won. Deepmind, a company purchased by Alphabet Google and based in the U.K., had developed a program named AlphaGo which had recently defeated Fan Hui, a professional 2 dan living in France. This was the farthest any computer had come in playing go at a high level. Shortly after the match, a five-game series with Lee Sedol, the world's top player at the time, was arranged with $1 million in prize money for the winner. Lee Sedol has been called one of the most innovative players of the twenty-first century. He has a strong fighting spirit and thrives in complicated battles with uncertain projections. He entered the professional world at the age of 12, becoming the fifth youngest South Korean player to do so at the Hanguk Kiwon. At the age of 21, he advanced to the rank of 9 dan, the highest rank in the organization. Until the 1950's, a historical variant of go called "sunjang baduk" was played. It had a fixed starting position of 8 white stones and 9 black ones. White would play first after the 9th black stone was placed on the tengen (center) point. It used a unique counting system and led into quick fights due to its initial layout. As of now, the game is rarely played in favor of starting with a blank board. |
Lee Sedol vs AlphaGo, Fourth Game
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Go in The West
Oskar Korschelt brought the game to Germany and Austria in the 19th century after learning the game while working in Japan.
Three chess-players try their hand at go
Emmanuel Lasker, the longest-holding world chess champion, took an interest in the game for a short time. He wished that he had learned it earlier in life.
Oskar Korschelt brought the game to Germany and Austria in the 19th century after learning the game while working in Japan.
Three chess-players try their hand at go
Emmanuel Lasker, the longest-holding world chess champion, took an interest in the game for a short time. He wished that he had learned it earlier in life.