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Archives for Go
An Elegant Sexual Convention
I bought an excellent book on Go from Amazon last week. I was particularly impressed when I noticed a interesting writing convention that’s used throughout the book, despite the current trends regarding gender neutrality in writing.
The black player is always referred to with male personal pronouns and the white player is always referred to with female personal pronouns.
The use of gender-specific pronouns contributes greatly to the clarity of text describing gameplay that could easily become very confusing:
Black takes the ko with 23. Now White may not capture Black 23 immediately, so she plays somewhere else with 24. Black responds at 25.
Chess Is A Battle, Go Is A War
I spent the good part of Sunday trying to relax by diving back into Go, which I haven’t played in probably 15 years.
Go is a three-thousand year-old board game originating in China. It’s deceptively simple. Each player takes turns placing small stones on the intersections of a grid, trying to either surround enemy stones or enclose territory. The rules can be taught in a half-hour or so. Like chess, one can spend a lifetime studying the game.
I’m a little surprised the game isn’t more popular here in the states. We Americans do tend to like land-acquisition games (football, Monopoly, etc.). Perhaps a holdover from the whole manifest destiny thing.
I downloaded a free Go program for OS X called Goban. Despite the fact that computers don’t play Go nearly as well as they play chess, the program has been kicking my ass pretty consistently.
Once I get my game back, I’ll be looking for challengers. Any takers?
