Note: This essay reflects on my long and mostly unsuccessful attempt to learn the game of Go. I first encountered the game through Yasunari Kawabata’s The Master of Go, which portrays Go not merely as a contest but as a cultural ritual tied to patience, tradition, and dignity. Like many readers, I came away with the impression that the game contained some deep strategic wisdom.
Naturally, I tried to learn it.
The attempt did not go well. Despite buying a few introductory books and trying computer tutorials, I quickly discovered that the game required a kind of spatial patience and intuition that I simply did not possess. The books remain on my shelf as evidence of that early ambition.
The essay also reflects on a friend who has continued studying the game seriously for years, meeting regularly with a teacher and approaching the board with a patience I deeply admire.
Finally, the piece briefly touches on the modern transformation of Go through artificial intelligence. Even as machines have surpassed human players, the quiet ritual of the game continues wherever people sit down together and place the stones.
Epigraph
This game is bloody impossible!
— Matt Thomas
I first heard about Go when I was around twenty-one.
This was 1995 and I was going through what might fairly be called a Japanese literature phase. I was reading Natsume Sōseki, Junichiro Tanizaki, and Yasunari Kawabata, along with a terrific mystery writer named Seicho Matsumotowhose books I devoured with great enthusiasm.
Somewhere in that run I encountered Kawabata’s famous novel The Master of Go, which tells the story of an aging master playing a final match against a younger challenger. The novel is less about the tactics of the game than about ritual, tradition, and the quiet passing of an era. The old master loses, and the loss seems to symbolize something larger than a board game.
It made Go sound mystical.
Naturally I decided I should learn it.
This did not go well.
I bought a couple of books with encouraging titles. One of them was called Get Strong at Invading, which sounded promising. Invading! I imagined bold strategic incursions and elegant positional mastery. The whole thing seemed very Japanese, very subtle, very deep.
Then I tried actually playing the game.
At the time I had a computer program that included a beginner tutorial board — the little 9×9 version, which is supposed to be the simplest possible entry point into the game.
I was completely hopeless.
Not slightly confused. Not rusty. I mean utterly lost. I stared at the board as if it were some kind of philosophical diagram whose meaning had been explained to everyone else but me. Stones appeared, shapes formed, and somehow everything I did made the position worse.
Within a short time I realized a painful truth.
I was a complete washout at Go.
I gave up quickly.
The books remain on my shelf to this day.
Go, as it turns out, is not chess.
Chess feels like an argument. Pieces attack and defend, plans unfold, and even when you lose you usually understand why. Go feels more like weather. Stones accumulate quietly across the board until suddenly there is a vast pattern you cannot quite explain but which apparently determines everything.
Experts talk about influence, thickness, and sente.
I am still trying to figure out which group is alive.
My friend Dean, on the other hand, actually plays the game.
Every month or so he meets with an older Japanese gentleman who teaches him. Dean told me once that the teacher has very few students, so he feels a kind of obligation to keep showing up. I admire this enormously.
Dean is a patient man. I have known this since about 2003. He has the stamina to sit with the board, to think, to place stones carefully and let the game develop at its own pace.
Patience is not my natural game.
While Dean studies Go properly, I have mostly watched from the sidelines as the larger story of artificial intelligence unfolded around the game. I had followed the earlier moment when Deep Blue defeated Garry Kasparov back in the 1990s, and I suspected something similar had eventually happened in Go as well.
Sure enough, the breakthrough arrived when AlphaGo, developed by DeepMind, defeated top human players. Even the greatest masters of the game now study the moves produced by machines.
The machines, it turns out, understand Go better than we do.
Even attempts to escape the machines do not entirely succeed. When Bobby Fischer invented Fischer Random Chess — now called Chess960 — he hoped to eliminate opening theory and restore creativity to the game. Yet modern engines have mastered that variant as well.
Even Fischer’s attempt to outflank the machines eventually became another playground for them.
Which leaves the rest of us where we began.
Dean continues to sit across the board from his teacher, patiently placing stones and learning the game properly. The ancient rhythms of Go continue quietly in small rooms all over the world.
Meanwhile I remain stuck where I started, staring at a tiny beginner board and wondering what on earth I am supposed to do next.
And the books, I should add, are still on the shelf.
Dedication
For Dean, who plays the long game.
Note: If you like this essay, you may like the essays linked below.
The Kyoto Kibbitzer 