I’ve had a lot of guests who thought the little stones in the bowl on the coffee table in front of my desk were M&M’s and popped them in their mouths. In fact, these black and white stones, which are not bigger than a fingernail and which are kept separately in two different bowls, are used to play GO, a strategy game originated 4000 years ago. It is said that the game originated in China and Tibet.
GO, which is played on a board that looks like a crossword and has 19 vertical and 19 horizontal lines, is a simple game without many rules. Its object is to capture your opponent’s stones, to remove them from the board and to form territories. There are 181 black stones and 180 white stones in GO. Black, the player with the black stones, makes the first move. It is claimed that people who are familiar with checkers, Chinese checkers and similar games play GO to prove that they have been promoted to a higher league. However, the fact is not that simple since GO is a strategy game. No computer simulation could be developed for GO since its combinations could be 264 times more than those of chess. Google said the possibilities of moves in GO were more than the stars in the universe.
METU GO Club published the paragraph below on their website once:[1]
“The simpler the more universal. Considering its simple rules and almost infinite possibilities, Go has a chaotic ramification that cannot be comprehended by today’s artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence (DeepBlue) that beat the Russian chess champion, Kasparov, was developed, but no artificial intelligence that can beat an average Go master has been developed yet. The problem is that artificial intelligence is helpless against master Go players in a space full of too many possibilities that cannot be calculated by today’s computers. “
According to an Eksi Sozluk[2] author, if chess was a merchant, GO would be a philosopher. When you look at the world of GO, you see that it has its roots in a universe surrounded by peace, respect, kindness and ethics.
I found out about GO in the end of 1970s. Everyone has some books to read and some movies to watch again and again during their lives. Shibumi, which introduced me to GO, was such a novel for me. I have never been an active GO player, but I have always had a GO board close at hand and the black and white stones to play this game.
I have read Shibumi at least 4 times. Trevanian, the author of the book, was an interesting man of letters. His real name was not Trevanian, and nobody, except for his publisher, knew that his real name was Rodney William Whitaker until he died at 74 in December 2015. GO is a strategy game and Trevanian wrote Shibumi based on the strategies of this game.
There are some points that make the trio of Trevanian, Shibumi and GO mysterious for me. First of all, a real GO board is made of a tree with roots and it represents nature that we share when it is put together with its black and white stones. Then, Shibumi was written in the 1970s, but the computer called Fat Boy in the novel does the things done by Google today. In addition, there is an “invisible hand” controlling even CIA in the novel just like the one sticking out like a sore thumb in today’s world. And most importantly, the whole novel is developed based on the strategic scenario of GO.
Life has gone on in a bitter, painful but “hopeful” way for 4000 years during which black and white stones have been placed on a GO board. It was all about how much land one would have until the twentieth century. Governments owning land got the mines, crops and local economy in their land as a “bonus”. GO had nothing to say about that because humans were not developed enough to deal with it. After all, the developments in the world were just land trading on a GO board.
The game went on for centuries in that way, but Black changed “strategy” because of greed, vanity, egotism and rapacity. S/he, who had already started the game with and extra stone, started to make the rules of the game. S/he had reasons in her/his own right. S/he had arms and money. Therefore, it had to be played “as s/he wanted“. The rules that concerned the whole life such as the rules of trade, how nature could be destroyed and who will earn how much from where were placed on a GO board through the agency of Black controlled by “an invisible hand“.
Nevertheless, GO didn’t lose its self-confidence. White, the player with the white stones, could counterattack, develop a strategy and beat Black.
In fact, the USA, the world’s superpower, had difficulty in finding allies to topple Saddam Hussein due to “possession of chemical weapons” before the Second Gulf War although it left no stone unturned. The main reason for that was the anti-war demonstrations in the world capitals.
It seemed like a new page could be opened when the financial frauds causing the global recession in 2008 were unveiled.
The 50-year civil war was stopped in South America thanks to the attempts of Juan Manuel Santos, the president of Colombia.
However, things usually don’t work. They can’t! Maybe the USA was not able to find an ally for the Second Gulf War in those days, but the results of its interference are obvious. Maybe we thought that we learned a lesson from the recession, but the income of the world’s 64 richest people still equals to the income of the half of the world population (3.5 billion people). The huge gap in distribution of income confined rich people to the prisons called cities whose walls were built by them, and they are not even aware of it! Colombians may have laid down arms, but civil wars are financed all around the world. In other words, Black carries on playing the game according to his/her own rules.
However, the strategy moved from energy to food. Food and seed, which were on the game board in 1950s, are making a comeback. For instance, the companies in the poultry industry in Turkey are going bankrupt one by one. Why? Because they buy chicks from international companies. Feed, the main input of the industry, consists of genetically modified products and it is also sourced from international companies, of course. The industry is dependent on these international companies from soup to nuts. Naturally, they make the rules. The people in this industry almost cannot go to the loo without getting permission from the international companies. Unfortunately, White couldn’t see the move made by Black!
Edward Snowden, a former Central Intelligence Agency employee who had to reside in Moscow temporarily, revealed how the system worked by providing documents. The Guardian published that story in its simplest form so that everyone could understand it. In order to understand the strategy right, we should mention that the USA, the UK, France, Russia and China, the permanent members of the UN Security Council, are the leading manufacturers of the arms industry which is worth USD 2 trillion.
GO and Black contradicted each other in terms of “ethical and moral” profundity. GO drew the rules of the game, the main source of its 4000-year sustainability, on the game board which represented an ethical and moral platform. Black, on the other hand, tried to change the colour of the board by saying “I don’t like it”.
However, the game board whose naturalness was not liked by Black, shows that the ecological balance has been upset and nature has lost its power of self-renewal. We keep witnessing floods, mountains of mud leaving hundreds of people buried under a wreckage, epidemics caused by them, crops which do not grow in dry soil, famine, poverty, the ozone hole and climate change. We see that the number of people who cannot access potable water is increasing to two billion. We witness that the number of people who have to leave their homes and live as “refugees” due to these disasters is nearly equal to Turkey’s population.
Maybe we stumbled and fell down due to Black’s moves, but we used to believe that we could pull ourselves together and carry on with the white stones we had. After all, GO had seen a lot for 4000 years and brought us to this date. Many kings, emperors and dictators came and went throughout history during these 4000 years but none of them were able to strip humans of their main values. That was because GO was a strategy game and it had a scenario which allowed White to offer his/her own strategies as much as Black until 23rd May 2017. AlphaGO developed by Google’s DeepMind beat the best professional GO player Ke Jie on that date. Maybe Ke Jie was not “Black”. Maybe he represented one of the last flags raised to struggle for White’s honour. However, there was another phenomenon that gave the message “I’m in the game now!” as a result of all the scuffles between artificial intelligence and humans. What would happen if the artificial intelligence, which considered the possibilities for the number of moves nearly as many as the stars in the sky and designed a scenario to beat its opponent in seconds, adopted the method we deem proper for trees today and considered us “surplus“?
Which one is more ironic? The fact that “the human brain” developed the artificial intelligence which may destroy it one day since it is not “useful” for this planet or the fact that the devil in us invented a new game called GO? Is it just bad luck that Black has an extra stone and can make the first move?
I don’t know if it is any consolation, but there is also the paragraph below in the quote taken from METU GO Club’s website.
“Computer programmers may be able to give computers a soul or find another way to beat humans. Whatever the solution is, the most miraculous thing revealed by the “question of Go” is humans’ ability to create such a game. Artificial intelligence may beat Go players one day, but it will only become human when it can create a game like Go and enjoy it. Then, it should start making mistakes like every human.”
I think something like this will be written on the last page of the 4000-year history.
[1] http://go.metu.edu.tr/yazi12.html
[2] An online collaborative Turkish dictionary
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